“Here They Are in the Lowest State Of

“HERE THEY ARE IN THE LOWEST STATE OF SOCIAL GRADATION —ALIENS—POLITICAL—MORAL—SOCIAL ALIENS, STRANGERS, THOUGH NATIVES”: REMOVAL AND COLONIZATION IN THE OLD NORTHWEST, 1815-1870

A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by Samuel M. Davis (May 2019)

Examining Committee Members:

Andrew Isenberg, Advisory Chair, Department of History Bryant Simon, Department of History Harvey Neptune, Department of History Christina Snyder, Pennsylvania State University, Department of History

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines African colonization and Native removal colonization schemes and their relationship to the development of states carved out of the Northwest Territory.

Colonization advocates sought to expunge the nation of slavery, free blacks, and native peoples to make a white republic.

This research contends that colonization promoted racial nationalism by campaigning for a safe and homogenous nation free of slavery, ‘degraded’ free blacks, and dangerous Native

Americans. It explores the execution and afterlives of American projects for African colonization, through the American Colonization Society, and Native Removal in the Old

Northwest. It examines the rhetoric and procedures related to the colonization of Native

Americans in the West and free blacks to Liberia in which government officials, journalists, settlers, businessmen, missionaries, and clergy in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois traded in fears of racial degradation and national security as a means to generate fiscal support and positive public opinion for legislation and policies that attempted to create a white republic.

Colonizationists appropriated imperial relocation solutions to the domestic problems of black freedom and Native sovereignty that they construed as prohibitory to national expansion and development. Ventures to deport Native Americans and African Americans successfully constructed them as dangerous aliens within the nation that validated their exclusion. In their resistance African Americans, Native Americans, and their allies adapted, fled, petitioned, ridiculed, and negotiated with colonizationist endeavors to maintain residence in the Midwest.

The fictions of colonization, driven by its rhetoric, required new constructions about black and

Native degradation to justify the calls for their removal.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………iii

CHAPTERS

1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...…1

2. COLONIZATIONIST AMBITIONS ………………………………….………………..26

3. “TO COLONIZE THIS UNFORTUNATE RACE OF MEN:” TOWARD A POLICY OF

REMOVAL IN THE OLD NORTHWEST………………..…………….………………64

4. COLONIZATION AUXILIARIES AND ANTICOLONIZATION ACTIVISM IN THE

OLD NORTHWEST……………………...…………………………………………….109

5. “FREE BUT NOT WHITE:” LEGAL DISABILITY AND INTERSECTIONS OF

COLONIZATION………………………………………………………………………144

6. “A REMEMDY FOR OUR PRESENT TROUBLES AND FUTURE DANGER:”

ANTISLAVERY POLITICS AND COLONIZATION.…………………….…………187

CONCLUSION………………………………………………………..……………………..…239

BIBLIOGRAPHY.…………………………...... ……………………………………245

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In October 1817, a local citizen in the state of Indiana wrote a letter to Bushrod

Washington. The unnamed Indiana citizen lived in Vincennes, Indiana, which had served as the original capital of Indiana territory. Vincennes was the site at which territorial Governor William

Henry Harrison contentiously managed relations with Tecumseh over American expansion into

Indian territories prior to the War of 1812.1 By 1817, the state capital had moved to Corydon,

Indiana but Vincennes was still a growing town in southwestern Indiana that bordered Illinois

Territory, separated only by the Wabash River. Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George

Washington, served most notably as a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as the first president of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Washington supported the founding of the ACS as an original member, which began in 1816 to transport free blacks from the United

States to West Africa.

In his letter, the letter’s author mentioned that he had learned about the ACS through newspapers that had covered the society’s formation. He wrote to Washington that he felt “a deep interest in your Society, and highly approve the patriotic and benevolent motives which have induced its formation” while also acknowledging how proud he felt that a man by the name of Washington was its president.2 He offered his aid to the ACS and informed Washington that approximately fifty to one-hundred free blacks lived near Vincennes, whom he assumed would be interested in moving to Africa. He attested that local free black residents lived on both sides

1 Patrick Bottiger, “Prophetstown for Their Own Purposes: The French, Miamis, and Cultural Identities in the Wabash—Maumee Valley,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 29-60. 2 “Copy of a letter from a respectable gentleman in Vincennes, in the state of Indiana, to the Hon. Bushrod Washington, President of the Society for the Colonization of Blacks,” Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 127.

1 of the Wabash River in Illinois Territory and the state of Indiana. He described them as generally

“industrious and moral. Some of them have landed property and are good farmers; and some can read and write. They are sensible of the existing degraded condition in which they are placed by our laws, respecting the right of suffrage, and other disabilities.”3 He closed out his letter to

Washington by requesting a copy of the ACS’s constitution to provide it to local free blacks and even offered his time and energy to help get them to an embarkation point for the ACS to transport them to Africa. This citizen from Vincennes espoused the appeal of colonization in the

Old Northwest. Despite the ownership of property, literacy, and the independence of free blacks, in the midst of degradation predominately attributed to the imposition of legal disabilities, deportation to Africa apparently served as a plausible solution to the residence of free blacks in

Northwest Territories and states.

The War of 1812 and the violence with Native Americans marked a significant flashpoint in the Northwest and throughout the nation. Proponents of American expansion in the Northwest sought to physically, culturally, and demographically transform Indian territories into American spaces. They determined that free blacks and Native Americans posed significant threats to the continued expansion and development of the United States. The emergence of coherent, related projects of Native removal and African colonization following the War of 1812, was accelerated by the fact that enslaved Africans, as well as Native nations, allied themselves with the British during the Late War. These parallel deportation schemes imposed a disparaging rhetoric on free blacks and Native Americans in vindicating calls for the removal and transportation of free

3 “Copy of a letter from a respectable gentleman in Vincennes, in the state of Indiana, to the Hon. Bushrod Washington, President of the Society for the Colonization of Blacks,” Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 127.

2 blacks to Africa and Native Americans west across the Mississippi River.4 African colonization and Native removal sought to expunge the nation of persons potentially hostile to white citizens and American expansion.

African colonization and Native removal projects endeavored to create a white republic.

These two distinct imperial projects ran parallel to each other in antebellum America. They were connected through colonization proponents who viewed nonwhites as imminent threats to the nation and its citizens. Colonizationists deemed Native Americans and free blacks so dangerous that the only way to protect the nation, and nonwhites, was through their removal from American territories and states.

Both relocation projects sought to compensate nonwhites primarily through their removal from white prejudice. Colonization ventures endeavored to use space and migration to circumvent white prejudice and legal disability. Indian removal sought the voluntary emigration of Native people. Removal proponents executed their plan through coercive treaties and land cessions that eventually deteriorated into forced removal by gunpoint diplomacy. Removal compensated for Native land cessions in various ways such as land exchanges, land improvements, and annuities. African colonization sought the voluntary emigration of free blacks. Colonizationists attempted the recruitment and transportation of willing free black emigrants to Liberia. Black emigrants would be compensated by land grants in Liberia.

Colonizationists’ preferred nation-building tools, of removal and relocation, absolved white

4 These related colonization projects used a rhetoric of black and Native degradation to support its claims to benevolence. Ryan contends that the antebellum period witnessed the construction of a “benevolent racism” that has “reverberated in U.S. social policy ever since.” Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 16.

3 prejudice by appropriating spatial solutions to concerns over Native and free black habitation in the Old Northwest.

This research argues that colonization, as both ideology and process, promoted racial nationalism by campaigning for a safe and homogenous nation free of slavery, debased free blacks, and dangerous Native Americans. Colonizationists appropriated imperial relocation solutions to the domestic problems of black freedom and Native sovereignty that they construed as prohibitory to national expansion and development. Ventures to deport Native Americans and free blacks successfully constructed them as dangerous aliens within the nation that validated their exclusion. In their opposition to colonization, African Americans, Native Americans, and their allies adapted, fled, petitioned, ridiculed, and negotiated with colonizationist endeavors to maintain residence in the Old Northwest.

Native removal and African colonization ventures were nation building projects that resolved the anxieties over multiracial inclusion in early America. Colonizationists’ rhetoric proclaimed the benevolence of these twin removal projects as protection for Native people and free blacks from a mature, sometimes violent, and often unrelenting tide of white prejudice.

Through violence, land cessions from treaties, and armed forced removals, states in the

Northwest dramatically reshaped the Indian population demographics in Ohio, Indiana, and

Illinois that had construed Indian removal as a statistically successful venture. Nevertheless,

Indian removal was not able to expel all Native persons from these states. In fact, treaties were responsible for concentrating large tracts of land into the sole ownership of Native band chiefs and other prominent Native persons. This enabled some Native Americans to survive removal.

Alternatively, African colonization was regarded as a failure because statistically it was not able

4 to remove the mass of the free black population from these states. Free black organizing and opposition to colonizationist efforts stymied colonization’s effectiveness in the Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. However, shifting the primary focus away from the demographic goals of colonizationists can shed light on the worthwhile successes of African colonization and Native removal in that they constructed free blacks and Native Americans as dangerous aliens within the nation. Colonizationist rhetoric was immensely successful in validating nonwhites as unbelonging in America and this legacy outlasted eastern Indian removal efforts and the decline of the ACS’s popularity.

The rhetoric of colonization both imposed and exploited the marginalized status of

Indians and free blacks as key to advancing the benevolence of deportation for nonwhites. The ideology of colonization diffused into several components of Free Soil and Republican policies on expanding and reconstructing the nation. Colonizationist thought on Native people and free blacks did not just evaporate midcentury, it was inconspicuously reinvigorated and adapted for post Civil War America.

The Old Northwest was the nation’s first experiment in nation building and territorial development after the American Revolution. The Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in territories north of the Ohio River.5 The federal government admitted Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to the Union as states with bans on slavery between 1803 and 1818. The Northwest Ordinance and these states’ initial constitutions set these places apart from the rest of the nation as a region

5 Finkelman argued that early territorial officials were creating in protecting and encouraging de facto slavery while using the ambiguous language within the ordinance to maintain de jure antislavery. Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 9 No. 1, (April 1989), 21-23.

5 dedicated to freedom. Slavery never took hold as legally sanctioned in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as it did in the South. However, the states carved out of the Northwest Territory were still home to multiple forms of unfree labor of mostly persons of African descent and there were legitimate, concerted efforts to expand slavery into these territories and states.6

The growth of Native removal and African colonization schemes in the free Northwest signified how local citizens sought to make safe, prosperous states and a nation. Colonizationist schemes functioned as tools of state development that represented how locales in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois expressed their ideas about freedom and expansion. Colonizationists in the free states of the Old Northwest sought freedom from the residence of free blacks and Native Americans.

Colonizationists envisioned a national future of a white republic based on the supposed incompatibility of a multiracial polity that provoked deportation as plausible solutions.

Colonization was the successful iteration of nineteenth century American nationalism that prevailed over both abolitionist and proslavery visions of America’s future. Colonizationism informed American continental expansion and its ideals became reproduced in the discourse and policy concerning how, when, and if people of other nations could be incorporated as equal citizens within the nation in the course of American imperial territorial acquisition.7 The

6 In Illinois, indentured black servants were owned and labored as de facto slaves. The Panic of 1819 also spurred local interest in the proliferation of slavery in Illinois. See M. Scott Heerman, “In a state of slavery: Black servitude in Illinois, 1800-1830” Early American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, (Winter 2016), 114-139. Adam Rowe, “The Republican Rhetoric of a Frontier Controversy: Newspapers in the Illinois Slavery Debate, 1823-1824” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 31(4), (Winter 2011), 675-677. 7 Historian Steve Hahn offers a new synthesis on the changing relationship between nation and empire that argues that the US inherited empire as its model of governance from the British and projected its colonial vision continentally and hemispherically. Steven Hahn, A nation without borders: the United States and its world in an age of civil wars, 1830-1910 (New York: Viking press, 2016). Scholar Eric Love offered a sweeping narrative that imperialist silences on race in late nineteenth century American foreign policy enabled American policy makers to avoid the discourse on multiracial citizenship while furthering territorial acquisitions. Eric Tyrone Love, Race over empire: racism and U.S. imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

6 ideology of colonization, which aspired for a white republic that would be safe from the dangers of Indians and free blacks, absolved institutionalized white prejudice and reconciled anti-Indian and anti-black racism with America benevolence.

In contrast, Native Americans, free blacks and their allies charged colonization schemes as plots to either obtain Native lands or to strengthen slavery throughout the nation. Native

Americans and free blacks refuted colonization as benevolent. Colonizationists’ support for removal rested upon their fundamental belief in the temporary and geographically dependent stigma of nonwhites. However, this fiction, specifically in terms of Native removal, as Indians executions of civilizationist policy prompted the acceleration of the timeline for Indian removals.

Indians’ adaptations precipitated calls for their removal and their supposed degradation was increasingly in name only, more accurately attributed to white prejudice. For African colonization, the fiction of black degradation also supported calls for their emigration.

Meanwhile, free blacks argued that they were disgraced by law, not by nature or race. The scheme of colonization absolved white supremacy and sought to employ migration to solve the paramount problem of apprehension for multiracial democracy. The fictions of degradation within colonizationist rhetoric mobilized and validated calls for racial nationalism by physically moving free and independent blacks and Indians out of developing predetermined American spaces.

Native peoples and free blacks both sought to make new lives and solidify their communities in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the midst of rapid change. However, Indian and free black deportation schemes sought to remake this diverse region into a white racially homogenous place. Removal schemes had varied successes in remaking the racial demographics of the region. These schemes failed to wholesale remake the region racially homogenous,

7 primarily due to the efforts of Natives and free blacks to adapt, impede, and negotiate with these deportation projects.8

African colonization and Native removal were not new ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century, but both relocation projects received a new coherent and organized imperative for the

United States following the Treaty of Ghent and the end of the War of 1812.9

Indian removal, executed through land sales, land cessions, and treaty negotiations had a history that pre-dated the Revolution. Along the Atlantic coast and the expanding Northeast,

Indian removal paved the way for territorial expansion and created colonial boundaries that protected both Indians and colonists from each other. Settlers flooded into the Old Northwest after the Revolution. This created tensions and violent encounters as settlers moved into spaces belonging to Indians and ahead of American negotiations for land purchases. Land cessions in

8 Historians Natalie Joy and Mary Hershberger point to the dual concerns that abolitionists held for both enslaved Africans and Native peoples in early America. In particular, the push for inclusion for Native Americans influenced abolitionists’ rhetoric for African Americans and against the Slave Power. See, Natalie Joy, “The Indian's Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights” The Journal of the Civil War Era vol. 8 no. 2, (June 2018), 215-242. Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s” The Journal of American History Vol. 86, No. 1 (June, 1999), 15-40. 9 In the aftermath of the War of 1812, civilizationism, as primary Indian policy, was practically abandoned and actually became an impediment to Indian removal as Native nations adapted and negotiated through treaties to achieve an American definition of civilization. Removal received a new urgent imperative that was supported and executed locally and federally in the Northwest to create, insulate, and secure American territories and states. Alan Taylor and Gerald Horne argued that fleeing enslaved people who became soldiers and support for the British war effort animated much of the fear about free and enslaved people as enemies and the drive to find a safe method to drain off the growing black population. While Horne focused on the extended chronology of British support and exploitation of enslaved Africans in the rise of abolition, he cites the War of 1812 as a significant flashpoint for the United States. Taylor states that in reference to Virginia the“war gave some substance to their long-standing fear of the internal enemy, and that southern fear put the Union in peril.” Alan Taylor, The internal enemy : slavery and war in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 10. Gerald Horne, Negro comrades of the Crown : African Americans and the British empire fight the U.S. before emancipation (New York : New York University Press, 2012).

8 the form of treaties continued; however, not at a fast enough pace for settlers moving westward.10

Scholarship on Native Americans and American expansion focused on Indians’ attempts to develop collective responses to removal pressures and the internal politics and movements of

Native bands as a partial response to American expansion.11 Indian removal in the South focused largely on the Cherokee and the Five Civilized Tribes as intragroup conflicts influenced their ability to collectively respond to removal pressures.12

The War of 1812 exacerbated tensions between American settlers and Indians in the

Northwest Territories. The disinclination on the part of both settlers and government officials to distinguish between Indian enemies and allies “laid the political groundwork for the largely successful attempts to appropriate the lands of all Indians, and to remove all Indians.”13 The

10 Stuart Banner argued that law was critical to dispossession of Indian land and transference to European colonists and American settlers. Stuart Banner, How the Indians lost their land: Law and power on the Frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) 11 Historians Walter Nugent and Patricia Limerick point to the long histories of American colonialism in terms of western expansion, even though their monographs differed on the role of the frontier. See, Patricia Limerick, The legacy of conquest : the unbroken past of the American West (New York : Norton, 1987). Walter Nugent, Habits of empire : a history of American expansion (New York : Vintage Books, 2009). Other scholars noted the deep fissures within Native communities and multiple divergent paths that Indians took as a response to dispossession and removal. Some Native bands complied and followed through on land exchanges while others sought to negotiate for property and citizenship. Gregory Dowd, A spirited resistance: the North American Indian struggle for unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007). Michael Green, The politics of Indian removal: Creek government and society in crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 12 See, Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Ronald Satz, American Indian policy in the Jacksonian era (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1976). Grant Foreman, Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972). Theda Perdue and Michael Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York : Viking, 2007). 13 Settlers in the Old Northwest argued for Indian Removal after the war of 1812 since several Indian nations allied with the British. Despite several nations also siding with the Americans, settlers failed to distinguish between Indian nations and called for mass removal. The continued British presence around Ft. Detroit after the Treaty of Ghent also unsettled settlers weary of war and Indian violence. Historian Karim Tiro argued that the aftermath of the War of 1812 that initiated a national trend toward removal can best be gauged through changes that took

9 aftermath of the War of 1812 initiated the start of a national Removal period. Removal in the Old

Northwest began before the formal admittance of states to the union, but reached its apex after these lands had already been formally organized into American spaces.14

Native history in the Great Lakes region focused on removal, migrations, and the reconstructions of Native life in the context of dispossession and American Indian policies.15

Removal scholarship in the Ohio Valley examined treaty negotiations, removal routes, the proliferation of reservations, and the varying strategies employed by Indians in resistance to removal.16 Indian Removal in the Old Northwest developed through treaties and war that usurped

place in the Old Northwest. Karim M. Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian Removal,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 35, No. 1, (Spring 2015), 54. 14 Several Indian removal treaties occurred in the Old Northwest after territories were admitted to the Union such as the Treaty of St. Mary’s (1818), Treaty of Wabash (1840), and the Treaty of Chicago (1821). Removal in the Old Northwest mirrored the South in an extended decades long process of remaking the spatial and racial boundaries of states. Bethel Saler argued that this trend in the Old Northwest marked “the young American nation as both a postcolonial republic and contiguous domestic empire.” The continuous process of turning western lands into American spaces fused ideas on culture, gender, and racial constructions to fuel white settlers ascendant claims to authority over western lands. Bethel Saler, The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 1-7 15 Removal in the region encompassed more than just the straightforward dispossession of Indian lands in the Old Northwest. In fact, the Great Lakes region had a short but effective history of treaties and coercive measures to garner land cessions that did not initially pursue outright Indian removal. See, Bert Anson, The Miami Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1970). Stewart Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana : a persistent people, 1654-1994 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996). Patrick Bottiger, The borderland of fear : Vincennes, Prophetstown, and the invasion of the Miami homeland (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Migration and relocations fueled the breakdown and conflict within Native bands from the Old Northwest as they once again faced white settler encroachment. Sami Lakoma¨ki, Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007). Native bands in the Upper Great Lakes, some of which had migrated from the south, were better able to maintain and reconstruct their communities in the midst of removal fervor. Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Great Lakes Indian accommodation and resistance during the early reservation years, 1850-1900 (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2009). 16 Bowes recent monograph stands out for its narrative of Indian removal in the Northwest. It is the first to attempt a synthesis of Northwest removals as he acknowledges the difficulty of such an endeavor. John P. Bowes, Land too good for Indians: northern Indian removal (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). Most Great Lakes removal scholarship focused on particular local dynamics, Native nations, bands, or treaties. These narratives remain significant, as the Northwest was the first American “West” and the nation’s first experiment in federally governed colonialism. Including the Northwest in histories of Native removal reveals that slavery was not central to the inception of national Indian removal plans. Removal in the Northwest makes clear that ideas of Native misuse of land, which impeded white settler expansion and economic development, was critical in the drive to commence schemes of removal. See, Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Tribes

10 land from Indian nations. Some of the treaties through which these land cessions occurred negotiated either for smaller reservations on less desirable land within these states or for outright removal to the Trans-Mississippi west to places such as Missouri and Kansas.17 The rhetoric governing land management in early America incorporated fictions of colonization, specifically around dispossession. In their communications, citizens, politicians, settlers, and Indian agents repeatedly argued for removal and land cessions based on their interpretations of the misuse and disuse of land by Native peoples.18 The scholarship on expansion, empire, and Manifest destiny in nineteenth century America is vast and continually growing.19 Within that trend, several historians have also moved recently toward explorations of American settler colonialism.20

African colonization’s eighteenth-century antecedents arose amongst enslaved and free persons as they sought to insert themselves into Revolutionary era rhetoric of liberty and natural

(Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2014). R. David, Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978). Stewart Rafert, The Miami Indians of Indiana : a persistent people, 1654-1994 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996). Edmund Danziger, Jr., Great Lakes Indian accommodation and resistance during the early reservation years, 1850-1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 17 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers : Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18 This fiction is readily apparent when we consider that treaties under civilizationism that garnered land cessions from Native bands erected sawmills, gristmills, and other civilizationist modifications for the improvement of Native communities. However, their building and use of these tools did little to counteract how Indian agents and settlers opinion of them and used supposed Native misuse of land to support later calls for their removal. John P. Bowes, Land too good for Indians: northern Indian removal (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 50- 77. 19 Horsman argued that the nation’s original providential vision of expansion centered around the spread of a racially and linguistically homogenous people across the continent. Reginald Horsman, Race and manifest destiny: the origins of American racial anglo-saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). Nugent characterized the United States as a continental empire in its increasingly expansionist goals. Expansion moderated through Manifest destiny also had gendered limitations in its formulation. Walter Nugent, Habits of empire: a history of American expansion (New York : Vintage Books, 2009). Amy Greenberg, Manifest manhood and the antebellum American empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 20 Scholarship that investigated expansion and empire in an explicit settler colonial framing gauged the degrees of Indian sovereignty in the context of American continental expansion. See, Lisa Ford, Settler sovereignty: jurisdiction and indigenous people in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native" Journal of Genocide Research vol. 8, no. 4 (December 2006), 387-409.

11 rights.21 As a structured, coherent program, African colonization attained its most significant progress through the American Colonization Society (ACS) founded in Washington, DC in 1816.

The ACS and schemes of African colonization have been interpreted as anti-slavery politics in action that facilitated manumissions and established the colony of Liberia. Some of the historiography on African colonization and emigration in the first half of the nineteenth century focuses on the factionalism and dissension within the American Colonization Society, founding purpose, and the colonizationist movement generally.22

Institutional histories of the American Colonization Society and its state level auxiliaries yield clarity on how to situate the ACS as a nineteenth century reform organization.23 While the

21 In its earliest iterations during and after the American Revolution, free blacks and enslaved Africans pursued African colonization most fervently as a response to the dislocation and discrimination they faced in Northern states. They sought to remove themselves to Sierra Leone in the hopes of finding better prospects at inclusion and autonomy. Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). Winston James, The struggles of John Brown Russwurm: the life and writings of a pan-Africanist pioneer, 1799-1851 (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 22 Fox argued that African colonization arose as a solution to the ‘negro problem’ which he noted was national and not sectional. African colonization was one of the only venues in which men from all over the nation could calmly engage in a conversation on the ‘negro problem.’ Pointedly, Fox stated that “Any adequate estimate of the work of Colonizationists must take into account the effect of their program upon the preservation of national unity.” Early Lee Fox, The American Colonization Society, 1817–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1919), 11. Foster submitted that African colonization emerged as a parallel scheme to Indian colonization to place free blacks outside the nation, especially since early nineteenth century policies on free blacks resembled the segregated polices governing Indians. Noble located the impetus for founding the ACS in western, northern, and southern elites searching for a solution to the problem of free blacks. Staudenraus located the founding principle of the ACS in Robert Finley and his ideal of Christian benevolence to the free and enslaved people. Black deportation would secure the nation from dangerous these dangerous persons. Burin argued that colonization was enacted to end slavery and black residence in the nation altogether, but that the ACS functioned as an antislavery organization given its many successful manumissions. Throughout the more than one hundred years of ACS historiography the literature ebbs back on forth on purpose and meaning of the organization. I contend that early turn of the twentieth century scholarship, like Fox, accurately captures the meaning of the ACS even if more recent scholarship situates it as antislavery. It was both antislavery and sought the complete deportation of all people of African descent. Charles Foster, “The Colonization of Free Negroes in Liberia, 1816–1835,” Journal of Negro History, 38 (1953), 41–66. Henry N. Sherwood, “The Formation of the American Colonization Society,” The Journal of Negro History, 2 (1917), 484–508. Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 23 Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). Douglas R. Egerton, "Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious": A New Look at the

ACS had several prominent political figures, such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Bushrod

Washington as part of its executive leadership, the society functioned as a typical early American voluntary organization. Perhaps due to its prominent leadership, or due to the imperial goals of the ACS, it is not typically discussed along with other early voluntary associations and progressive social movements within civil society.24 American civil society was the primary space for discourses on Jacksonian democracy. Since suffrage in early America was limited in varying locales by race, gender, and property ownership, civil society represented the method by which the non-voting public was able to engage in early American politics.25

African colonization, for its part, encompassed more than struggles over slavery, abolition, or black citizenship. It also connoted the future of the nation and the possibility of consent for racial homogeneity. As David Walker expressly noted “the colonizing trick…..is not for the glory of God, but on the contrary the perpetuation of slavery in this country, which will ruin them and the country forever, unless something is immediately done.”26 Black anticolonization activists determined that colonization threatened not just persons of African descent but the very fabric of America as a nation rhetorically committed to liberty and

American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 463-480. Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 24 For a welcomed exception that incorporates the ACS into discourses of civil society see Kathleen McCarthy, American creed: philanthropy and the rise of civil society, 1700-1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Walters situated the ACS as part of a conservative mode of reform in the nineteenth century. Ronald G. Walters, American reformers, 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 25 See, Anne Boylan, The origins of women's activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). See Ronald Formisano, For the people: American populist movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Elizabeth Varon, We mean to be counted: white women & politics in antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Julie Jeffrey, The great silent army of abolitionism: ordinary women in the antislavery movement voting (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 26 David Walker, David Walker's appeal, in four articles, together with a preamble to the coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 67-68.

13 republican government for which the institution of slavery made a perversion of both. Early rhetorical supporters of African colonization considered the Caribbean, some unspecified place west of the Mississippi, Sierra Leone, and Africa generally as potential spaces to (re)move free blacks and enslaved Africans. This would make space for Jefferson’s ‘empire of liberty’ as free white yeoman farmers would populate and spread throughout the nation.27

Historians of colonizationist ideology tried to unravel its contradictions to properly ascertain a coherent motive and strategy behind a seemingly implausible goal.28 Studying the ideology of colonization charts a return for historians of African colonization in trying to ascertain and situate the ACS as an antislavery, abolitionist, or “to suggest a class oriented basis for colonization” at its founding.29 Colonizationist ideology in terms of Native Removal, preserved American moral character in the reform era, averted hostile conflict, and endeavored to create a racially homogenous region, while also executing Native dispossession.30 Although

27 Jefferson famously invoked the expulsion of nonwhite residents in his vision of an empire of liberty in the Revolutionary era. However, he was not the only American president to lend support to African colonization or Indian removal. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe both maintained Indian policies that mirrored Jefferson’s wavering of civilization and removal. President Monroe also supported colonization. The ACS named the colony’s capital Monrovia after the President Monroe in appreciation of his administration’s support. Christian Keller, “Philanthropy Betrayed: Thomas Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase, and the origins of federal Indian Removal policy” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 144, No. 1 (March 2000), 49. Claude Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2009), 7-28. Richard H. Immerman, Empire for liberty : a history of American imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-19. 28 Tomek situated the ACS as antislavery organization that at times opposed abolitionism. Spooner seeks to reorient historians focus to understand the ACS in a larger picture of post-Revolution struggles to coral expanding and inclusive democratic processes. Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Matthew Spooner “‘I Know This Scheme is from God:’ Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 35, No. 4, (Winter, 2014), 559–575. 29 Douglas R. Egerton, "Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious": A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 479. 30 Indian removal ideology centered the perceptions of necessary cultural transformations in Indian character or simply hostilities and violence between Native people and white citizens. John T. Fierst, “Rationalizing Removal: Anti-Indianism in Lewis Cass's North American Review Essays,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Fall 2010). Patrick Griffin, "Reconsidering the Ideological Origins of Indian Removal." The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic (Athens : Ohio University Press, 2005). Sean P. Harvey, "" Must Not

14 executed through treaties, Native removal itself was a violation of Indian sovereignty as the

United States inconsistently enforced treaty resolutions that served to slowly erode Native autonomy and confidence in the treaty making process.31

Henry Sherwood’s scholarship on African colonization is much older but remains particularly insightful and instructive to my analysis of colonization’s rhetoric and meaning in early America. Sherwood connected the onset of the ACS as a formal organization with a colonial history of deportation for black criminals, and as a social management tool for free blacks that evolved into “the logical outcome of manumission” by the end of the eighteenth century.32

This project seeks to move away from narratives on colonization in early America that centralize mobility and migration in its explorations of colonization’s appeal and its influence in early America. This research defines colonization as an ideal in terms of its practitioners’ philosophy on the productive merits of colonization for the United States. Exploring colonization as an ideology, in contrast to mobility and migration, provides an alternative interpretation of its meaning in early America. Colonization as an ideology, that centers the way its practitioners privileged the benefits rendered to the nation in the removal of nonwhites, was how colonizationists, Indians, and free blacks understood its meaning and purpose in early America.

Studies on migration and mobility, while valuable in seeing cross cultural exchange, the movement and spaces of Native and black communities’ reconstitution, and cycles of

Their Languages Be Savage and Barbarous Like Them?": Philology, Indian Removal, and Race Science." Journal of the Early Republic vol. 30, no. 4 (Winter, 2010). 31 Colin G. Calloway, Pen and ink witchcraft treaties and treaty making in American Indian history (New York : Oxford University Press, 2013), 2-9. 32 Henry Sherwood, “Early Negro Deportation Projects” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (March, 1916), 487.

15 colonialism, conceals part of the extent of colonization’s affect and its mass appeal. Migration in the study of colonization moves the site of the narrative that exposes the connections between space and race, but also obscures the space in which colonization ideals are produced that can unnaturally evoke that movement made colonizationist ideals obsolete in these spaces. Migration and movement as central to colonization can lend credence to the fictions of benevolence submitted by colonizationists that nonwhite relocation was in fact the most plausible solution to the problems of multiracial inclusion in early America. Migration focused inquiry moves the site of colonization studies that can obscure both the ideology of colonization and what happened in its aftermath. What did colonizationists envision would happen in the event that nonwhite removal was successful? What new possibilities for state development and new benefits were conceivable after nonwhite removal from these spaces?

The study of colonization, beyond the mere pronouncements of its supporters, necessitates the study of its fictions. The multiple fictions of colonization comprised its rhetoric of nonwhite degradation, which absolved white prejudice and cloaked white nationalism under the guise of benevolence. The fiction of benevolence was predicated primarily on the words of colonization supporters.33 Colonizationists declared their actions as benevolent to free blacks and

33 Historian Nicholas Guyatt argued that historians should view Indian Removal and African Colonization in context with each other given that both rested on principles of benevolent colonization that “allowed proponents to argue for segregation without determining that nonwhites were permanently inferior.” Nicholas Guyatt, “’The Outskirts of Our Happiness,’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History, 95 (March 2009), 987. For his part, Staudenraus was also swayed by the purported benevolence of reform minded ACS spokesmen. The test of benevolence should be regarded in terms of its appeal and embrace upon its portended benefactors, namely Native Americans and free blacks. Guyatt cautioned historians about interpreting benevolent colonization as straightforwardly racist given that it embraced, in part, redemptive potential for Indians and African Americans in racial separation from white Americans. However, given the considerable Native and black opposition to colonization should push historians to reconsider its benevolence. Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Nicholas Guyatt, Bind us apart: how enlightened Americans invented racial segregation (New York : Basic Books, 2016), 10-11.

Native people because white prejudice made it impossible for nonwhites to become equals in

America. Therefore, by delivering them to appropriately racialized spaces, either Africa or west of the Mississippi River, then nonwhites would be removed from white prejudice and empowered to realize their full potential to build autonomous nations. However, colonizationists always prioritized the benefit rendered to America by removing nonwhites as paramount to colonization’s overall worth. Therefore, despite their proclamations about the benevolence rendered to nonwhites, colonization proponents were mainly concerned with the welfare of

America first and foremost.

Collective narratives of Native removal and African colonization appear most often in the scholarship on the antebellum South and the rise of slavery in the Deep South.34 However, historians should also account for the popularity of removal and colonization in the anti slavery states of the Old Northwest. White fear in the Old Northwest animated much of the popularity for projects of Native removal and African colonization.35 In places such as Ohio, Indiana, and

34 Rothman argued that violent American expansion created Jefferson’s empire of liberty as slavery’s spread was critical to the origins of Deep South. Slavery’s expansion was a crucial component that led to increasing demands for Indian removal. Garrison submitted that state legislation and judicial decision had primary influence over the trajectory of Cherokee removal. In this sense removal on the federal level, while important, has skewed historians’ vision of state sovereignty in Indian relations. Clegg and Burin provided deep analyses of colonization in North Carolina that facilitated manumissions by Quakers providing insight on the localized direction of ACS auxiliaries. Claude A. Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 53-58. Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 36-37. Tim Garrison, The legal ideology of removal: the southern judiciary and the sovereignty of Native American nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 59-63. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), x-xi. 35 Scholars Owens, Parkinson, Taylor, and Horne collectively articulate fear of black, Indian, and British assaults against American citizens and how the unity for American rebels and newly created American citizens remained powerful in forging a national identity. Robert M. Owens, Red dreams, white nightmares : pan-Indian alliances in the Anglo-American mind, 1763-1815 (Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). Robert G. Parkinson, The common cause: creating race and nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Alan Taylor, The internal enemy: slavery and war in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, (2013). Gerald Horne, Negro comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British empire fight the U.S. before emancipation (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

Illinois, colonizationist discourses and actions received support from the political elite and the general public at large.36

In this project, I use the terms removal, colonization, and deportation interchangeably to describe these racialized relocation efforts in early America. I use removal to represent the idealized physical movement of nonwhites beyond American borders to spaces deemed to be racially suitable for Indians or free blacks. I use colonizationist(s) to refer to supporters of these twin relocations schemes. Proponents of both Indian removal and African colonization envisioned those projects as forms of colonization in which nonwhites would act as loose extensions of American civilization, but also in terms of the productive benefits of the act of colonization itself, not unlike English colonization of North America and its subsequent benefits to American rebels. I use deportation as a term to describe both projects to imply how relocation efforts reconstructed native born persons as aliens and sought to expunge them from the nation through force and coercion.37 Belonging is a term that is also used intermittently throughout this

36 As these states progressed in their social and territorial development, they sought to create societies that were safe, prosperous, and avoided the social and political entanglements over slavery. These states endeavored to achieve racially homogenous polities through Indian removal, Black Laws, and support for the rising popularity of the African colonization movement. Siddlani argued that constitutionalism in the Old Northwest was bound up with moral struggles over inclusion and exclusion along racial boundaries as well as economic development Silvana R. Siddali, Frontier democracy: constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3-5. 37 Kanstroom discusses how repeated discourses about Native failures to assimilate drove dispossession and reservation policies throughout the nineteenth century. Parker argued that immigration legal history espoused “two intimately conjoined histories: that of the country’s absorption and rejection of those from beyond its limits and that of its simultaneous efforts to render foreign those within its limits.” Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation nation outsiders in American history (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 2007), 71. Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4.

18 project. I appropriate it from Barbara Welke and deploy it based on her definition and use as a functional device.38

Supporters of removal and colonization can be described as colonizationists because the process of colonization and the action of moving to new spaces for a fresh start with persons of the same race was central to the benevolence of colonization for Native people and free blacks.

Removal and colonization both used space and imperialistic practices to solve the domestic problems of race, equality, and citizenship. Nicholas Guyatt’s recent monograph provides a concrete example of the intertwined natures of African colonization and Native removal in early

America.39

This project is an intellectual history of colonizationism. To that end, I engage with subfields of American history in studies of the black emigration, Native removal, American expansion, and recent studies that weave these strands together to understand the relationship between ideas of race, law, and the trajectory of American politics in the nineteenth century.

38 Welke’s submitted that “Part of the value of the borders of belonging as a conceptual tool is its power to expose instances in which belonging for some is achieved through the subordination of others. No figure in the liberal state was self-defining; privilege and subordination, as the term suggests, were interlocked and interdependent.” I use it in my research in the same manner to illuminate the connective nature of exclusion and inclusion but also to gesture to its greater meaning to development for states in the Northwest and nation building in the nineteenth century. Barbara Welke, Law and the borders of belonging in the long nineteenth century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. 39 In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt’s recent study of African colonization and Indian removal in the early Republic, he argued that benevolent white reformers opined that nonwhites could only advance and raise themselves to an equal status with whites by leaving the United States which served as a kind of precursor to turn of the century separate but equal ideology. I contend that Guyatt takes the purported benevolence of moral reformers at face value and misreads the ideology of colonization that compromised with white supremacy and absolved white prejudice that inhibited non-white progress and belied non-white removal as the only tenable solution. Both projects were different with distinct goals and different successes and failures in their execution from the perspective of colonization supporters. However, the similarities in the fictions of nonwhite degradation, benevolence, and the presumption that white prejudice was insurmountable, run through both relocation projects. Nicholas Guyatt, Bind us apart: how enlightened Americans invented racial segregation (New York : Basic Books, 2016), 6-12.

Tracing colonization’s mass appeal required that I engage with legal history, Native history,

African American history, and political history in order to accurately account for its influence on

American expansion, nation building, and the development of race in the nineteenth century.

In exploring and analyzing the arrays of prejudice and discrimination levied against

Native Americans and free blacks it is important to note that in the long range of American history anti-Indian racism is separate and unique from anti-black racism. Both forms had different iterations that are particular to each group in time and place. However, there are significant intersections and parallels between schemes of African colonization and Native removal. According to supporters, both projects would deliver nonwhites from the tide of white prejudice in America to racially homogenous spaces west of the Mississippi or to West Africa where they would be able to realize their full potential and become civilized. By bringing both forms of anti-black and anti-Indian racism to bear in this project through colonization, it reveals the commitment to white supremacy, racial nationalism, and its connection with development in the Old Northwest. This research aims to construct a narrative of colonization as a nation building tool that diffused into law and politics that adopted racial nationalism as its coherent foundation.40 American nationalism was inseparable from racial nationalism, they were mutually

40 Benedict Anderson stated that nation-states are imagined socially constructed communities. He posited that “nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind.” This dissertation argues that colonization represented methods of constructing cohesive communities and states in the Old Northwest. Settlers, politicians, commissioners, Indians and African Americans argued for competing types of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 4. Racial constructions of whiteness are not permanent or absolute. They are temporary, constantly disputed, and periodically reformulated in the context of its contested boundaries, specifically Indianess and blackness in this research project. White nationalism is better understood as a much sought after goal, in consideration of the constant contestations over its definitions, applications, membership, hegemony, locations, and representatives that make it fluid, temporary, and by necessity protean. This dissertation offers that American nationalism itself was a primary mover of race and racial constructions in a manner similar to class politics and economics. As legal scholar has argued, whiteness is a form of property delegated and protected by law that was wielded to make claims to other types of property. I contend that the form of nationalism that emerged in the Old Northwest formed prior to the Civil War. It opposed the Slave Power but still centralized race and expansion as

20 constitutive as both African colonization and Native removal forwarded parallel discourses on the benefits of white, racially homogenous states.

This project details the multiple iterations of colonizationist ideology in schemes of

Native removal, free black deportation, racialized legal disability, and antislavery politics. The first half of the dissertation covers the process of Native American and free black colonization plans in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The narrative traces the application of colonization ideology by exploring the actions of local ACS auxiliaries and the execution of Native removals. The first chapter recovers the ideology of colonization predicated on the supposed degradation of Native

Americans and African Americans that necessitated their removal. In contrast to the acceptance of colonization’s benevolence, this chapter asserts that colonizationist ideology was primarily about the nation’s self-interest in a white republic. As such, colonization also provides a window to explore and understand American state development in the nineteenth century. By reorienting the focus and study of colonization on its goal of a white republic reveals nineteenth century nation building centralized white nationalism as virtuous and a primary goal that became physically expressed through colonization schemes, but not bound to only colonization in its nineteenth century iterations.

The second chapter examines Native removal by exploring Miami and Potawatomi treaties and land cessions that culminated in their removal over a three-decade period. It contends that dispossession evolved and became exclusively orchestrated through removal because Native peoples attempted to negotiate through treaties to assert themselves as

foundational and connecting for its beneficiaries. See, Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 106, No. 8 (June, 1993), 1707-1791. Susan-Mary Grant, North over South : northern nationalism and American identity in the antebellum era (Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2000), 78-79.

21 autonomous equals in the developing states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Their adaptations to civilizationist policies and rhetoric buttressed against claims of Indian degradation that supported preemption rights for squatters and land cessions that generated revenue from land sales, which prohibited further land dispossession. Chapter three explores local ACS auxiliaries in this region that endeavored for the removal of local free blacks. In response, free black residents developed a multifaceted anticolonization strategy to combat colonizationists activism that in fact maligned black freedom. Free blacks and their abolitionist allies argued that colonization was a scheme to rivet the chains of slavery in America and challenged colonizationists on their antislavery principles. Black anti-colonization activism encompassed fights against slavery, colonization, and racialized legal disability. Free black residents connected all three battles in their struggles to maintain residence in the Midwest and claim equal access to education, suffrage, and the courts.

The second half then shifts to law, judicial opinion, and politics that follows colonization proponents as they debate legal disabilities imposed on non-white residents, push state and federal legislatures for public money for colonization, and import these practices as federal solutions to the problems of emancipation and western expansion in the Civil War era. Chapter four situates the proliferation of admixture legal cases in the Old Northwest in the context of colonization advocates that utilized existing racialized legal disabilities to justify their claims for nonwhite removal. Admixture cases encouraged mixed race persons to pursue civil suits to be declared legally white to transgress racially discriminatory laws. In so doing, it vested white citizens with latent police power to locate and identify racial status amongst their peers in execution of the law. Chapter five explores antislavery politics through fusionist compromises, western expansion, land policies of homesteading, and pre-emption rights that supported and advanced colonizationist ideals. This narrative revolves around Native land and free labor. The

22 twin goals of acquiring Native land for the expansion of free labor provides an opportunity to examine the development of free soil political ideology and its influence on Reconstruction era nation building.41 Colonization acquired renewed enthusiasm in the Republican Party of the

1860s because its principle of racial separation, as a guard against multiracial inclusion that absolved white prejudice, was a compassionate choice in the early efforts for reconciliation and nation re-building in relation to the Civil War and Indian wars.

To be precise, this a narrative about how free and independent African Americans and

Native Americans in the Old Northwest sought to make lives for themselves in the developing states of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Squatters, settlers, citizens, and politicians in the Northwest sought to make safe, prosperous communities and states specifically through expelling free blacks and Native peoples. Studies of slavery, expansion, and Native removal in the South have been used as place to explore the development of race and notably white supremacy in

41 A more critical and pointed investigation of histories of colonization in its efforts to create a white republic may provide greater clarity on why the hope of Reconstruction so quickly devolved into Jim Crow America beyond standard explanations of changing economics or political necessity. I find David Quigley’s work on New York to be particularly useful as he cites that Reconstruction in New York is a more accurate account for the issues of racism, immigration, and politics that plague the Gilded Age than a focus on the retreat from support of freedpeople in the South. David Quigley, Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction, and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). King and Tuck argued, “that Southern white supremacy was constructed in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, developments in the rest of the country after Reconstruction.” Furthermore, “At the grass roots in the North and West, there were not only isolated instances of racism, but a systematic and effective drive to establish white supremacy that mirrored developments in the South.” Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, “De- Centering the South: America's Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction,” Past & Present, No. 194 (February, 2007), 214. For scholarship that seeks to reorient historians’ vision of race in Reconstruction America beyond the South see, Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War wests: testing the limits of the United States (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). Hugh Davis, We will be satisfied with nothing less: the African American struggle for equal rights in the North during Reconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

23 antebellum America.42 However, African colonization and Native removal took root in the free states of the Northwest. Free states which, saved by a narrow vote in 1824 in Illinois, were legally opposed to slavery in their states.43 Although there was a proliferation of unfree labor with ambiguous titles in Indiana and Illinois. In the Northwest, white citizens held the same reservations about free blacks and Native Americans as their Southern counterparts. This is a story not simply the about promises and hopes of what freedom would provide but the realities of what freedom and independence failed to produce for nonwhites in the antebellum Northwest.

This project explores the ideological underpinnings of a particular process of nation building physically manifested in colonization but articulated through law and politics as well.

The subtext of nation building in this narrative reorients the ‘negro problem’ and the ‘Indian problem’ as a product of a white nationalism problem.44 In antebellum historiography scholars do an exceptional job of capturing the sentiments and prejudices expressed by white citizens.

However, I think that much work still needs to be done that can connect and align how white prejudice was materially validated. White prejudice, both anti black and anti Indian forms of it, was sanctioned and adapted according to need. American law and select public policies encouraged white citizens to act in racially discriminatory ways individually and collectively.

Likewise, there were sustained individual material costs to white citizens who chose not to uphold certain racialized constructions or boundaries that is readily apparent through episodes of

42 Goodman forwarded that “racialist utopianism formed one of colonization ism's strongest bisectional appeals” in early America. Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 20. 43 Adam Rowe, “The Republican Rhetoric of a Frontier Controversy: Newspapers in the Illinois Slavery Debate, 1823-1824,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 31, No. 4, (Winter 2011), 671-672. 44 In part, I am locating nationalism in the laws, policies, and social interactions residents, citizens, and settlers had with each other that expressed who they collectively envisioned as citizens and who could become citizens. Colonization schemes were forms of nation building that centered force and coercion in attempts to entrench changing racial demographics.

24 mob violence, but certainly not limited to mob violence. Maintaining such boundaries was economically in the best interests of white citizens that did not require any predetermined racialized animus on their part, but definitely promoted the development and acquiescence to a financially rational groupthink of white prejudice. The ultimate outcome being that part of white citizens’ civic responsibilities became wedded to a collective expression of white prejudice that defended multiple racialized boundaries. Colonizationists discourse preserved the myth of

American morality in the face of rampant white prejudice. Its fictions of benevolence provided moral cover for American expansion.

CHAPTER 2 COLONIZATIONIST AMBITIONS

In February 1815, a collection of about two hundred thirty citizens of Indiana Territory authored a memorial presented to the Congress. In the memorial, citizens pitched their claim for the preferable independence of statehood. They described Indiana Territory as fertile, desirable land but woefully underpopulated due to “to the fear of savage Depredations” from Native people.45 They reasoned that the nominal authority delegated through territorial governance was ineffective at increasing the local population in the goal of applying for statehood because of continued fear of hostilities with Native Americans. Congress had previously authorized the assignment of four companies of Rangers to protect the frontier in Indiana Territory. In the memorial, citizens expressed their appreciation for that step but contended that the safety of the frontier would be better secured through an increase in the population of settlers. An increase in white citizens would deter Native attacks and cost less for the federal government to maintain as opposed to hundreds of Rangers.

In pursuit of that goal, citizens requested legislation that enabled them to buy land at a bargain price in advance of speculators and that future squatters would also have the ability to purchase lands that they took up residence on. The memorialists preferred squatter friendly land legislation over armed soldiers in protecting themselves and the frontier. They tried to elicit sympathy from Congress for “fellow citizens & humble Petitioners, who lies in suspence, [sic] between savage cruelty & oppulent speculation” in the interests of both statehood and preferential land rights.46 These petitioners mobilized fear of Indian hostilities and connected it

45 Territorial Papers of the United States Vol, VIII (Washington, D.C., 1934), 331 46 Territorial Papers of the United States Vol, VIII (Washington, D.C., 1934), 333

26 with expansion as part of a rhetoric to advocate for their specific interests in land rights. The appropriation of a particular and broad racialized fear would become a powerful component in an evolving rhetoric of expansion and development in the Old Northwest displayed prominently through colonization.

This chapter explores the connections between Native removal and African colonization in early nineteenth century America. The colonization of Native peoples and free and emancipated blacks shared a discourse of degradation and benevolence that buttressed a national vision that its proponents had for the United States in the realization of both projects.

Colonization supporters sought to purge the nation of Native Americans and free blacks and secure the country from the dangers their presence engendered. Dangers such as the potential of renewed violent conflict with Natives, the political and physical disputes over slavery, and most fearfully, the potential for insurrection from the enslaved.

Specifically, this chapter advances an ideological focus and interpretation to colonization, rather than one centered on the geographies of colonization, nascent American imperialism, or mobility in the movements and confinements of Native Americans and free blacks.47 In seeking an ideological rationale, it recovers the proposed benefits rendered to the nation in the execution of both projects that colonization proponents touted as equally important, and often times more important, than the benefits conveyed to removed peoples. This chapter argues that the ideology of colonization connected Native removal and African colonization through its discourse of nonwhite degradation and prioritized the benefits bestowed on the nation through the removal of

47 Scholarly works that trace movement and centralize mobility include John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007). Claude Clegg, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality : Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).

27 free blacks and Native Americans as in America’s best interests. The discourse on colonization advanced by early members of the American Colonization Society and architects of American

Indian policy, situates the Old Northwest as a site where the discourse on deporting Indians and free blacks came together.48 In the Old Northwest, colonizationists’ rhetoric found fertile ground and became utilized and employed by local citizens, governors, missionaries, clergy, Indian agents, and members of local ACS auxiliaries.

Colonization schemes in early America constituted a mode of nation building. Both relocation ventures took root in the states carved out of the Northwest Territory. Exploring colonization and removal in the Northwest situates these deportation projects in the midst of western expansion and state development of the Old Northwest, as its advocates sought to reshape the region’s demographics and forge racially homogenous states.49

To recover the ideology of colonization--that sought Native and free black removal-- requires an engagement with both the fears and hopes of colonizationists.50 Colonizationists, feared violent conflict with Native nations over land and property rights. They also feared local and inter-state disputes over slavery, fugitive runaways, and potential insurrections. The logic of colonization lay in its purported benefit for the security and economic development for the nation after the removal of Natives and free blacks. Colonizationists such as ACS founder Robert

Finley, Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy, and Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass,

48 In my use of discourse, I would define it as a superficial rhetorical strategy that provided cover for uniquely self- interested motives, which I appropriate from Susan Ryan. Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003). 49 Gregory E. Dowd, “Indigenous Peoples without the Republic” Journal of American History vol. 104 no. 1 (June 2017), 35 50 In her article, Barbara Fields reminds scholars that “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons.” Barbara Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology” New Left Review, Issue 181, (May/June 1990), 25

28 envisioned that the expanding nation could only prosper and reach its full potential by radically reshaping the racial demographics of America through the concept of voluntary emigration of

Natives and free blacks.51 Colonizationists’ aspired for a national future of, at best, a racially homogenous nation, and at least culturally homogenous persons most appropriate for the developing republic. Recovering colonizationists’ vision for the nation’s future provides necessary context to understand the significance of colonization in early America and its influence on expansion and state development.

Native removal in the Old Northwest has been characterized as one of the first removal projects in which the federal government was an active participant in separating whites and

Natives, as a result of the breakdown in Native-white relations in the 1790s, in contrast to the once popular Civilization program for Native assimilation.52 Scholarship on the African colonization movement, advanced by the American Colonization Society has revolved heavily around its founding and its relationship with anti-slavery and abolitionist activism in the nineteenth century.53 This chapter does not seek to directly engage in those specific debates.

51 In some cases, I use colonization as a term to represent Native removal and African colonization as both projects foregrounded the emigration of non-whites to spaces outside of the United States as key to realizing their potential for improvement and uplift. 52 Historians have also argued that the War of 1812 represented a significant turning point in the Northwest that soured relations as several Native nations allied themselves with the British during the war. The result was that Americans further racialized Natives en masse in their calls for extensive land cessions and removal that disregarded those Native bands that had allied themselves with the United States. Karim M. Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian Removal” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 35, No. 1, (Spring 2015). Patrick Griffin, "Reconsidering the Ideological Origins of Indian Removal: The case of the Big Bottom “Massacre," in The Center of a Great Empire: The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic (Athens : Ohio University Press, 2005). 53 Scholars have debated over whether Charles Fenton Mercer or Robert Finley is owed credit as its singular founder. That critical difference was important for some scholars to ascertain an exact motivation and guiding principle for the ACS and whether it could be succinctly categorized as a proslavery, anti-slavery, or perhaps even an abolitionist organization. See, Douglas R. Egerton, "Its Origin Is Not a Little Curious": A New Look at the American Colonization Society” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 463-480. Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).

Instead, this chapter will pivot and explore points of commonality in the discourse on

Native removal and African colonization.54 The unique, lasting, and perhaps most under examined aspect of the American Colonization Society was that it could find common ground with Americans of proslavery, abolitionist, and anti-slavery beliefs. All of these Americans agreed in principle that free blacks represented a specific danger locally and nationally in which the best solution for the nation would be to promote and fund free black emigration to Liberia.

Native removal, in a similar but less concerted line, united squatters, settlers, military officials, and land speculators as a solution to the dangers of westward expansion, dispossession, and resultant violent conflict with Native Americans.

Proponents of Native removal and free black colonization nationally, and, as follows, on the ground in the Old Northwest, endeavored to create racially homogenous communities. They reasoned that homogenous states would be safe from the dangers posed by nonwhite persons, even as they acknowledged but ultimately ignored issues of legal disability and white intransigence that perpetuated racial exclusion and generated negative racial stigmas.

Colonizationists hoped to solve this problem by pushing Native Americans west and coaxing free blacks into voluntarily moving to Liberia.

Native people strategically adapted to American assimilationist demands that worked against continued dispossession based on the fictions of the misuse and disuse of Native lands.

54 In Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, historian Nicholas Guyatt explored Native removal and African colonization in parallel contexts in the early America. Guyatt was correct in concluding that colonization was a compromise “for liberal whites, who were caught between the unambiguous promises of 1776 and the practical difficulties of creating a mixed-race republic.” However, he mischaracterizes the compromise. In the evolution of colonization thinking in the nineteenth century, that compromise turned into a covenant with white supremacy and a pernicious racism that absolved white intransigence as a primary impediment to multiracial inclusion. Nicholas Guyatt, Bind us apart: how enlightened Americans invented racial segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 10.

As a result, removal became forced to expedite the process of dispossession. African colonization never explicitly used forced but instead relied on black legal disability to coerce free blacks to voluntarily move away. However, periodic white mob violence, exacerbated by legal disability, served to motivate free black emigration. Both forms of coercive stimulus would help forge the Northwest as racially homogenous.

Collectively, both removal and colonization appropriated fantasies of degraded free blacks and Indians as validation for the benevolence of their relocation schemes. Colonizationists often stated that white prejudice was the animating factor in degrading nonwhites. The fictions of degradation empowered new intellectual rationales about the capabilities of nonwhites that insulated white prejudice and transposed accountability for its resolution onto Indians and free blacks. The rhetoric of nonwhite degradation depicted a white republic as a naturally virtuous and principled goal for the United States. These fictions later diffused into foundational principles of antislavery politics that sought primarily, to create a nation free of slavery and debased free blacks on supposed unimproved free soil throughout the West.

The fictions of colonization lay in its purported benevolence for nonwhites by removing them from the United States and relocating them to spaces outside the nation with other Indians or people of African descent. Of course, there were colonizationists who had genuine concern for nonwhites and believed removal to be the best strategy to aid their development. However, the ideology of colonization privileged the benefit rendered to the country in the expulsion of nonwhites as the primary motivation and goal of the two projects. The benefit rendered to nonwhites was typically secondary and convenient. Understanding this fiction of benevolence

31 and reorienting the study and analysis of colonization is key to understanding both its limitations and its broad success.55

Colonizationist discourse of degradation of Indians and free blacks and the national benefits of their relocation connected the parallel projects of African colonization and Native removal. Colonizationists held a very limited geographic view of which spaces were appropriate for Indians and free blacks. While the fictions of colonization masked its primary motive to create a white republic, it did also accurately assess the barriers to nonwhite inclusion in early

America. The fictions of degradation and nonwhite benevolence enabled colonizationist rhetoric to have a broad diffusion into politics and law that functioned to mask the primary interest of creating a white polity in those fields of practice, just as it did for colonizationists interested in reshaping the racial demographics of the nation. Colonizationists situated the benefits to nonwhites as secondary and convenient to the primary benefit for the nation that would be conducive to their vision of the nation’s future. Focusing primarily on the benevolence of colonization and the stigmas of nonwhites in their supporters’ rhetoric can obscure their stated goals of a white republic and pointedly, how they readily exposed the fictions of degradation by citing white prejudice as the primary reason free blacks and Native people would not be prosperous in America.

Local communities and states in the Old Northwest construed Indians and African

Americans as internal threats to the present and future safety, prosperity, and security of these states. The federal government and local states promoted removal and reservations for Indians as a solution to threat of internal insurgency and to mitigate future instability that may be instigated

55 The rhetoric of benevolence performed a racialized sleight of hand that absolved white supremacy and substituted moral reasonings for its self-interest and exaltation of a white republic. Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003), 5-16.

32 by other foreign powers. Removal also mitigated white and Indian conflict and furthered the development of the nation as squatters and settlers spread out onto former Indian held lands within these states. African Americans threatened to engulf the Old Northwest in questions of state sovereignty and slavery. The presence of free blacks could promote the influx of bonded servants or fugitive runaways and create legal questions of state sovereignty. Free blacks also held the potential to become impoverished and subsist on poor relief given their political and social discrimination.

Benefit to the nation

Colonization prioritized the proposed to benefit the nation by relocating dangerous

Native Americans and free blacks that would remake the United States into a white polity, which colonizationists envisioned would render the nation safe and prosperous. This discourse was advanced by a rhetoric of benevolence for free blacks and Native Americans.

The War of 1812, and its aftermath, emboldened a reassessment of American expansion that prompted the coalescence of these two parallel deportation schemes in the Old Northwest in the early nineteenth century. Indian nations led by Tecumseh allied with the British in the hopes of defeating the Americans and preserving an Indian territory in the Ohio Valley. Even though several Indian nations had also taken up arms on the American side, the war emboldened both federal and settler demands for Indian Removal.56

56 Robert M., Owens, Red dreams, white nightmares : pan-Indian alliances in the Anglo-American mind, 1763-1815 (Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 235. Karim M. Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian Removal,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 35, No. 1, (Spring 2015), 25-54.

During the early nineteenth century, as Americans moved west to colonize the continent, many questions surrounded the presence and destiny of Native Americans in the midst of growing settler populations. Military veterans, politicians, clergy, missionaries, traders, and settlers offered competing ideas about whether Native Americans could and should become incorporated as citizens. In the early years of the nation, Native removal was just one of several competing ideas proposed that would generate peace on the northwestern frontier. Federal officials pushed a removal agenda while local officials like Lewis Cass were receptive to the idea, but believed that it is not the yet the appropriate time to push for mass removal.

The discourse from the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the

United States was the prime facilitator of African colonizationist thought in the early nineteenth century. Founded in Washington, D.C. in December of 1816, the American Colonization Society

(ACS) traced the idea of its principle goal back as early as 1802 among President Thomas

Jefferson and then Virginia governor James Monroe. Monroe, prompted by the Virginia legislature, lobbied President Jefferson to negotiate space for colonizing free blacks from the

United States in the British colony of Sierra Leone. Jefferson’s administration was unsuccessful in these negotiations, but colonization remained a powerful idea for Virginians seeking a solution to slavery that would not generate scores of free black residents within the state.57

The ACS attributed its founding credit to the “particular exertions of Dr. Finley, of New

Jersey, and under the patronage of individuals who are considered ornaments to their country”

57 Daniel Preston, “James Monroe and the Practicalities of Emancipation and Colonization” in New directions in the study of African American recolonization (Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2017), 129-145.

34 which included Bushrod Washington, William Crawford, Henry Clay, Andrew Jackson, and

Francis Scott Key to name a few.58

Sometime shortly before the December 1816 meeting in Washington D.C., in which the

ACS was formally organized, Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey and the brother in law of Charles Mercer, penned his Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks.

Finley opened by posing two fundamental questions: “What shall we do with the free people of color? What can we do for their happiness consistently with our own?”59 These two questions outline the object, purpose, and unifying principle of African colonization forwarded by the

ACS. From the outset, Finley framed free blacks as political objects to acted upon, that at best, circumscribed the autonomy of their status as free persons. He also set the standard measurement for the benevolence of African colonization as a solution that had to serve the happiness of free blacks, as well as white citizens. In this sense, colonization had a limited altruism.60 If Finley is credited as the chief architect of the ACS, as most of the historiography and the ACS itself had claimed, then his submission that colonization had to serve, in part, the happiness of white

Americans, then the scheme and its purported benevolence hinged precariously on the benefits that would be rendered to the nation in the event that free blacks were successfully removed and voluntarily conveyed to Africa. As Finley declared, “If there is not reason to believe that it would be for the general benefit, the idea ought to be given up and the scheme rejected.”61 Herein lies

58 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 4 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 59. 59 Robert Finley, “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 9, (Jan 1834), 332. 60 This presented a contradictory problem moving forward in that free blacks overwhelming rejected colonization as a scheme designed to secure slavery in America. Therefore, as they opposed colonization so vehemently and denounced it then what happiness did colonization come to secure other than that for white citizens, as Finley suggested that it should serve foremost. 61 Robert Finley, “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 9, (Jan 1834), 334.

35 the logic of colonization. As Finley asserted, the scheme of colonization was worthless unless it could have a positive effect on America. Therefore, while he authored that it should and would lead to the happiness of both free blacks and white Americans; he seemingly also believed that if it did not positively benefit America then it was futile.

Native removal, like African colonization, garnered formal coherence and organization during the presidency of James Monroe. In late June 1818, Christopher Van Deventer, chief clerk in the War Department, wrote to Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass on behalf of

President Monroe. He informed Cass that the President had decided that the ultimate solution to the problem of Native presence was to remove all Indians west of the Mississippi River.62 This new policy proposed as an exchange of lands currently held by Native nations, for lands of the same size west of the Mississippi River. The United States would pay for all removal expenses and offer to double annuity payments for Native bands that would agree to remove west. Indians would also have the right to determine the final location of their removal. Annuities were reasoned to be a method to maintain Indian loyalty to the United States since the Old Northwest was still a region engulfed in the fear of Indian hostilities motivated by British sabotage and interference following the War of 1812. Van Deventer reported that President Monroe deemed removal important to national defense. In this new policy, some Indians, whom had become agrarian property owners, could potentially serve as a defense against other potentially hostile

Indians and as a buffer between hostile Indians and white settlement in the region.

Since Cass had been a veteran of the War of 1812 and previously responsible for negotiating federal treaties with Native nations in the Northwest, he would now also be

62 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 175.

36 responsible for carrying out this new policy initiative. Federal officials instructed Cass that if wholesale removal was not practicable, then he should negotiate for land cessions and small reservations for families and individuals, with Presidential approval required should Native owners decide to convey these lands. However, Monroe strongly preferred not to have reservations held in individuals’ hands if at all possible. President Monroe coveted American strength and safety on the frontier that he envisioned could only be brought by white settlement that replaced Native communities.63

Robert Finely and President Monroe were not the only colonization advocates that advanced a rhetoric that prioritized American national interests. At the 1824 annual meeting of the ACS, General Robert Goodloe Harper delivered an address in which he outlined three distinct objectives being “in the first place to aid ourselves, by relieving us from a species of population pregnant with future danger and present inconvenience; to advance the interests of the

United States by removing a great public evil.”64 Harper was a native Virginian who had very briefly served as a Senator from Maryland, and served as general in the War of 1812. As Harper noted the first and primary goal of the ACS was to benefit America by the removal of free blacks and manumitted persons. The other two secondary goals were to promote the welfare of these emigrants and to raise Africa out of a general state of disrepute.

Local citizens in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois conveyed the rhetoric of colonization that emerged out of the Department of War and the American Colonization Society in Washington,

D.C. Representatives of the Ohio Colonization Society argued that colonization neither strengthened slavery nor sought to deprive slaveowners of their property. Instead, it advocated

63 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 164-180. 64 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 7 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 7.

37 for a moral principle in the evil of slavery and the promotion of manumissions for the grand cause of removing free persons of color. Ohio colonizationists submitted that “the removal of the free black population from amongst us” was key to “the safety and perpetuity of our political institutions, as a great and free nation.”65 Deportation of local free blacks would guarantee the safety and prosperity of Ohio and the nation.

In its earliest years the ACS had a clear goal, but found itself chiefly concerned with raising funds for colonization and combating negative public opinion about itself. The board of managers, which oversaw direct operations of ACS agents and the society’s finances, envisioned local auxiliaries as vitally important to cultivate positive public opinion about the ACS, as well as be a method of generating revenue for the organization.

Northwest ACS auxiliaries had been tasked with raising funds for county, state, and national operational costs. In pursuit of their fundraising goals, these local auxiliaries often referenced other states that had already committed public funds to cause of colonization and speculated that Congress would soon follow. Senators and congressmen from Ohio were even instructed by the Ohio General Assembly to advocate directly for the federal government to aid the ACS in its goals “which is so eminently calculated to advance the honour and interest of our common country.”66 In February of 1829, the General Assembly of Indiana adopted a resolution advising all its congressional representatives to lobby for federal support of the ACS “believing that the cause of humanity, and the true interest of the United States, require the removal of this

65 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office of the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 9. 66 “Resolutions of the Ohio Legislature” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 3, 11, (Jan 1828), 351.

38 people from amongst us more speedily than the ability of the Colonization Society will permit.”67

Citizens in Ohio and Indiana had officially banned slavery in their state constitutions, yet they were constantly inundated with disputes over fugitive runaways from Virginia and

Kentucky that forced them into acquiescence to bounty hunters and complicity in returning enslaved property to slaveowners in the South. Increasing abolitionist and antislavery sentiment in the Northwest about the state’s complicity with supporting slavery spurred interstate disputes with illegal mobs seeking to either protect or retrieve fugitive runaways in both Kentucky and

Ohio.68 In the midst of these disputes, African colonization seemed to be an acceptable middle ground.

The first meeting of the Ohio State Colonization Society was held on December 19, 1827 at the hall of Ohio’s House of Representatives. Ohio had local auxiliaries that predated the organization of the overarching state society. Former U.S. Senator and Ohio governor Jeremiah

Morrow served as inaugural president for the statewide auxiliary. Ohio colonization advocates fretted about the future of their state with slavery along its southern border across from Virginia and Kentucky. They were troubled even more by a potential future with thousands of formerly enslaved Africans as southern states had enacted legislation to banish free blacks from the

South.69 Colonization would remedy these fears “by thus gradually removing this class of our population, we should not only be liberated from the apprehension of a servile war, at which

67 U.S. Congress, House, Joint Resolution of the Legislature of the State of Indiana in favor of Colonizing the Free People of Color 20th Cong., 2d sess., 1829. 68 Stanley Harrold, Border war : fighting over slavery before the Civil War (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 53-69. 69 Stephen A. Vincent, Southern seed, northern soil : African-American farm communities in the Midwest, 1765- 1900 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999), 26-45.

39 humanity shudders, but would moreover greatly improve the moral worth of the community.”70

For local advocates, colonization would benefit not only as a plan for free blacks and uplift the

African continent, but also as a plan that would restore the moral fiber of Ohio and the nation.

In part, the rhetoric of benevolence and reform was motivated by American postcoloniality. Yokota defined its particular American iteration as part of a process in which former British subjects sought to create a new identity as equal republican citizens and the legacy of “colonial dependence— and a corresponding sense of inferiority” influenced that muddy process.71 Yokota elaborated further that the in between space of Britishness and not fully formed Americaness “placed Americans in the paradoxical position of intellectually defending, and sometimes identifying themselves with, the very people they had killed, and dispossessed.”72

As such, developing colonizationist ideology presented an opportunity to resolve postcolonial tensions of national identity by both forging a nation of political equals and presenting the same opportunity, through colonization, to persons deemed to be unequal by race or culture.

Indian removal advocates in the Old Northwest also reasoned that deportation of Indians would render certain benefits to Native Americans and to the region. Missionary Isaac McCoy, like James Monroe, John Calhoun, and other Indian removal supporters contended that contact with whites served as a detriment to Native Americans. In 1827, McCoy published Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform, Embracing Their Colonization that authored his thoughts on

70 A Brief Exposition of the Views of the Society for the Colonization of Free Persons of Colour, in Africa (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1827), 84. 71 Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British how revolutionary America became a postcolonial nation (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010), 111. 72 Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British how revolutionary America became a postcolonial nation (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2010), 217. For further discussions of US postcoloniality see, H. Reuben Neptune, “The Irony of Un-American Historiography: Daniel J. Boorstin and the Rediscovery of a U.S. Archive of Decolonization” American Historical Review, Vol. 120 No. 3, (June 2015). Bethel Saler, The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

40 how the nation could move forward with mass scale Indian removal in a manner that operated compassionately to Native Americans.73

McCoy supported Native colonization as the only plan that could succeed in reforming and uplifting Native Americans. The current policy, which had opted for Indian containment through reservations, had been unsuccessful. McCoy stated that the failures of previous Indian policies had taught them to look towards the Cherokees and their successes as a template to use for other Native bands nationwide. He believed that “the colonizing plan contemplates the elevation of the Indian character. The degradation stamped on them by our first acts towards them, is to be removed by the very first step to be taken in the measure.”74 McCoy also argued

“the plan of colonizing the Indians promises to relieve us from all the inconveniences arising from their hostilities” and “from their residence among us on small reservations, where they have become a nuisance to society.”75 Native colonization in this manner would render a necessary benefit to the nation.

Lewis Cass had spent his time in the latter half of the 1820s negotiating and executing

Indian treaties in the Northwest and writing reviews that articulated his view of Native

Americans’ character that he hoped would drum up public support for removal. Cass had been appointed as Michigan Territorial Governor in 1813, after his service in the War of 1812. In his published writings that defended removal as sound policy, Cass cited McCoy’s pamphlet and his work as a missionary to establish removal as definitively benevolent. Cass railed against any

73 George A. Schultz, An Indian Canaan : Isaac McCoy and the vision of an Indian state (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 128. 74 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 30. 75 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 32.

41 possibility of Native Americans having independent states within the U.S. and argued that it would produce more trouble for citizens and states surrounding them. Cass touted the plan of removal as “just to ourselves, and liberal to them” reinforcing the primary and secondary benefits that Indian colonization was designed to provide.76

In 1831 Cyrus Edwards, brother of former Illinois governor Ninian Edwards, delivered an address at the state capital in Vandalia, Illinois. Edwards spoke to those gathered in the audience in the hopes of forming a state society as an auxiliary to the ACS. He spoke of the colonization cause as “unspeakably important to ourselves, our children, and our children's children.”77 He cited the numerous illustrious Americans, such as Jefferson and Madison, as well as the many church denominations that had already approved of the colonization cause. Cyrus Edwards proposed that through colonization patrons could “at once reconcile the policy of your laws with the humanity of your hearts.”78 Repeatedly colonizationists in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois cited the benefits that colonization would provide to the nation that aligned with national thought on the project. In fact, the auxiliaries in the Northwest espoused the fictions of colonization by arguing for both contemporary black degradation and the future potential for black improvement in Africa.

Like their national predecessors, ACS auxiliaries in the Northwest also had to walk a fine line between abolitionist and proslavery criticism. Proponents in the Old Northwest were

76 Lewis Cass, “Review: Documents and Proceedings relating to the Formation and Progress of a Board in the City of New York, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America” The North American Review, Vol. 30, No. 66 (Jan. 1830), 106. 77 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 3. 78 Here Edwards is referring to the Black Laws that restricted free black rights and protections in the North and the South. Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 6.

42 decidedly antislavery in their constructions of African colonization. In Illinois, Edwards touted colonization as in the best interests of those gathered and the general public throughout the state.

Illinois had a vested interest in colonization as a tool to protect the state from the threat of a mass influx of free blacks that would be, “an evil which all admit to be most unpropitious to the well being of a free community.”79 He advised the citizens of Illinois not to wait for free blacks to migrate into Illinois and then subsequently require more draconian black laws to combat their residence. Instead, he urged those gathered to preemptively act to protect Illinois by supporting the colonization cause. He stressed that while Illinois remained a free state, the threat of free blacks and the remedy of colonization was a national problem for which Illinois citizens had a vested interest “in the furtherance of a plan for diminishing with perfect safety the alarming increase of our black population?”80

In January of 1829, just over a month before Andrew Jackson would take office as the nation’s seventh President, the Indiana General Assembly sent a memorial to Congress that requested “a course of appropriate measures to be pursued, calculated to extinguish the claim of the Indians (more particularly the Miamies) to their reserved territory” in the northern part of the state.81 This specific Miami land reserve was a remnant from the 1818 treaty of St. Mary’s in which the Miami ceded large sections of lands in central Indiana in exchange for a $15,000 annual annuity and the rights to six separate reserves, inclusive of the one now sought after by the Indiana legislature. The General Assembly desired this particular Miami reserve because it

79 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 10. 80 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 11. 81 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report: The Committee on Indian Affairs, to whom was referred the memorial of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, asking the immediate extinguishment of Indian title within the limits of that State 21st Cong., 2d sess., (1831).

43 was adjacent to lands that had been previously selected for construction of a Wabash River canal.

Indiana now required this land for canal construction that would facilitate improved transportation and commerce within the state.

In the opinion of the General Assembly, the continued residence of the Miami on such valuable land obstructed white citizens’ freedom and independence which “tends materially to impede a system of internal improvements essential to the prosperity of our citizens, and in a degree jeopardizes the peace and tranquility of our frontier, which it is our right and our duty to secure.”82 The petition characterized the Miami band in northern Indiana as an obstacle to the autonomy and economic progress of the state. In no way did Indiana’s legislature question the rights of Miami land ownership or the legal standing of previous treaties in their pitch to

Congress for Miami dispossession and subsequent removal. Instead, the General Assembly framed their argument in support of removal in terms of vital infrastructure development, peace on the frontier, and a continued loss of income for the state. Benevolence toward the Miami was also an important component as the state contended, “the speedy concentration of the Indians in some permanent situation, distant from our frontier, offers the only practicable method of diverting them from indolent and vicious habits, to which, by their vicinity to our population, they are unhappily inclined.”83 Like most emerging removal rhetoric in the latter half of the

1820s, the state of Indiana established the benevolence of removal, in part, on the basis that

Native Americans needed to be separated from a white population that indulged them in destructive practices, namely the sale and consumption of alcohol. In keeping with

82 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report: The Committee on Indian Affairs, to whom was referred the memorial of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, asking the immediate extinguishment of Indian title within the limits of that State 21st Cong., 2d sess., 1831. 83 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report: The Committee on Indian Affairs, to whom was referred the memorial of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, asking the immediate extinguishment of Indian title within the limits of that State 21st Cong., 2d sess., 1831.

44 colonizationist ideology, they masked the primary benefit to the nation by offering a rhetoric of benevolence toward Native people. The Indiana General Assembly relied on what Nicholas

Guyatt called “the insistence that racial segregation was a benevolent and far-sighted measure that would allow non-white people to thrive.”84 A fundamental part of colonizationist fictions.

Colonizationist hopes and fears

Colonizationists’ hopes and fears drove the rhetoric of benevolence but also revealed their racial nationalist aspirations. For colonizationists, free blacks brought the threat of entanglements over slavery with fugitive runaways, kidnappings, and abolitionist struggles.85

They also feared that free blacks would entice more free and enslaved persons to migrate into the states of the Northwest. Indians likewise engendered fears of renewed violent conflict with squatters and settlers over land and property. Citizens in the Northwest feared violence amongst themselves over proslavery and abolitionist politics, and violent conflict with Native Americans over land and property. The very real threat of violence over these two issues made the appeal of colonization all the more enticing to safeguard the developing frontier.

In thinking about the nation’s potential for a post-slavery future, ACS founder Robert

Finley wondered about the consequences for the country in the event that slavery might meet its end, “yet if the people of color remain among us, the effect of their presence will be unfavorable

84 Nicholas Guyatt, Bind us apart: how enlightened Americans invented racial segregation (New York : Basic Books, 2016), 7. 85 Stanley Harrold argued for an extended history of violence over slavery in the Upper South and Lower North. In the Upper North along the Ohio River citizens in free states became accustomed proslavery mobs abducting fugitive runaways and white abolitionists. That violence emboldened widespread anti-slavery sentiment in states such as Illinois and Ohio. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

45 to our industry and morals?”86 He used this line of fear as rationale to promote colonization and envisioned colonization as an antislavery tool that could prepare the nation for the era in which slavery no longer existed.87

For Finley, a Presbyterian minister, colonization was a duty for virtuous persons of the

United States government. In revisiting the option for black colonization in Africa or a separate, closer U. S. territory, Finley said that Africa would be the safest place for the colony in interests of the United States and its influential slaveholding class. While a colony in a western territory of the United States would be cheaper and more practical, it would also mean that the U.S. would be in close proximity to autonomous formerly enslaved persons. He feared that such a western settlement of free blacks and manumitted persons could “combine with our Indian neighbors, or with those European nations who have settlements adjacent to our own, and we should have them for our enemies.”88 This potential western colony could even incite the enslaved to runaway to nearby settlements of sovereign black people. All of which could be remedied by the safety presented through distance created by an African colony “removed far from our sight; our contempt of them, produced by their situation, and by long habit confirmed, would gradually die away, and their jealousy and suspicion proportionably decrease.”89 Not only did colonization

86 Robert Finley, “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 9, (Jan 1834), 334. 87 As Egerton and Spooner suggested the future envisioned by colonizationists is critical to understanding the ACS’s ideals and its practical appeal to the nation. However, Spooner also noted the central strategy of colonization’s ideology, which was that “the ACS’s formulation of the problem, the root cause of black degradation was not black Americans themselves but rather white prejudice” and “the ACS substituted avoidance for amelioration.” This central contradiction was the crux of the ACS’s ideology, appeal, and politically unifying thread. Matthew Spooner “‘I Know This Scheme is from God:’ Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society,” Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 35 No. 4 ,(Dec 2014), 569. 88 Robert Finley, “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 9, (Jan 1834), 335. 89 Robert Finley, “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 9, (Jan 1834), 335.

46 hold the potential for a Christian redemption of Africa, that would repay a debt owed due to slavery, but it would also allow for white prejudice to miraculously dissipate.

Finley advanced this ambiguous line of thought in which free blacks were unhappy and certainly degraded in America, but retained the ability to take with them Christianity, civilization, and knowledge to Africa to build up the continent. In essence, Finley created and located the geographical boundaries of black equality as exclusively outside of the U.S. and contiguous territories, specifically in Africa.

Native removal supporters likewise authored a discourse that expressed their fears in advocating for Indian colonization. In January of 1817, Ohio Senator Jeremiah Morrow reported to the Senate on behalf of the Senate Committee on Public Lands. The report addressed a recent resolution referred to the committee that inquired about the possibility of an exchange of lands with Native Americans who lived east of the Mississippi River for public lands that were west of the Mississippi. In relaying the committee’s report, Morrow contended that in the interests of border safety and defense, white settlement needed to be continuous along the frontier. The present condition of intermittent white settlement, in the midst of Indian lands, was unsafe and caused the defense of such places to be very costly. Morrow and the committee contended that both Native Americans and white settlers were debased through contact with each other in the presence of an irregular border along the frontier. In making a case for Indian removal, Morrow submitted that any such removal must be through voluntary consent and improve the national defense. He recognized that Indians remained sovereign nations and treaties served as the only form of negotiation with them. He affirmed the Indian “right to remain in possession of the lands

47 they occupy, and to sell them when they please, has been always acknowledged.”90 Morrow’s argument constructed removal as benevolent since current Native and white contact was “an intercourse by which the civilized man cannot be improved, and by which there is ground to believe the savage is depraved.”91 In this sense, Native peoples were not capable of absorbing the values of American civilization and instead only acquired its iniquities.

Isaac McCoy looked to assuage fears that a Native colony could become a vengeful enemy to the nation by citing the location, geography, and governance of a proposed western

Indian colony as tenable to U. S. economic and moral interests. In his concluding chapter McCoy opined that in terms of Native removal “it would be our interest indeed to have them out of our way; but motives of humanity forbid removing them, until some provisions be made for their subsequent accommodation” as an “almost insatiable thirst for the extension of our settlements, prevails generally throughout the United States.”92 McCoy estimated the cost of removing Native

Americans to the proposed colony as merely ten percent of the money spent to date by the

United States in all of its previous Indian wars.

Colonizationists hopes were born out of their fears. They feared entanglements over the governance of slavery, violence caused by free blacks who fomented insurrections and encouraged runaways, as well as the violence from hostile Native Americans that opposed

American expansion. As such, they promoted Native and free black removal in the hopes that their local counties, states, and the nation would be safe from the dangers posed by Indians and

90 American State Papers: Indian Affairs, Vol. 2 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 123-124. 91 American State Papers: Indian Affairs, Vol. 2 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 124. 92 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 46.

48 free blacks. Their hopes required the complete removal of all independent Natives and persons of

African descent indiscriminately.

The ACS’s board of managers reasoned that people who dismissed the society usually did it on the grounds that they believed the plan of African colonization itself to be impractical but not the objective in removing free blacks. They also lamented the concerted efforts to publicly denigrate the society in the eyes of free blacks and disputed the notion that the society only wanted them to emigrate to a country of the society’s choosing. Colonizationists believed free blacks could be convinced that the emigration plan was in their best interests.93

In 1827, the Ohio state Colonization Society published a pamphlet entitled, A Brief

Exposition of the Views of the Society for the Colonization of Free Persons of Colour, in Africa, to be distributed to citizens throughout the state. The pamphlet outlined the Ohio auxiliary’s goals and strategy. The state colonization society sought out the charity of its citizens in support of colonization. Ohio colonizationists argued that the American Colonization Society could not achieve its goals on its own, but would need the “benevolence of the friends of humanity in our country.”94 Colonization proceeded in line with the majority of public opinion on the disposition of free blacks at the time.95 African colonization supporters envisioned themselves as an activist arm of social benevolence. Colonization represented the most reasonable and acceptable path forward that could alleviate the problem of slavery without producing an explosion in the free

93 This of course would quickly change as the ACS opposed black led efforts at Haitian emigration and supported solely colonization to Liberia. Colonizationists did not denigrate or seek to dissuade black migration to Haiti but believed that Africa would be a better choice, most likely in adhering to its necessity to be beneficial to the nation and its capitulation to slaveholders. Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against wind and tide : the African American struggle against the colonization movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 17-45. 94 A Brief Exposition of the Views of the Society for the Colonization of Free Persons of Colour, in Africa (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1827), 87. 95 Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: fighting slavery and prejudice in the Old Northwest (DeKalb: NIU Press, 2013), 36.

49 black population, as well as ensure the peace and safety of the nation. Cyrus Edwards similarly argued that the benevolence of colonization was “to provide for the removal to the coast of

Africa, with their own consent, of such persons of color as are already free,” as well as those who may become free through individual manumission or by laws of sovereign states.96

In 1829, Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass and General William Clark submitted a report approved by Secretary of War Peter B. Porter that laid an intellectual framework for new policy paths for Indian affairs.97 Cass and Clark’s report argued for specific changes to the governance of Indian affairs that included legislation that would regulate all nationwide intercourse with Indians, annuity payments, set new standards for operations of the Office of

Indian affairs, and create demographic charts to calculate and track Native populations. This report was then forwarded to Thomas Hart Benton on the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee.

Clark and Cass had been tasked with developing this report based on their many years of work and interaction with Native nations as treaty commissioners and supervisors of Indian agents in the West. Their report argued that “judging of the future by the past, we cannot err in anticipating a progressive diminution of their numbers, and their eventual extinction. Unless our border should become stationary. And they be removed beyond it” there was no alternative other than a near future of Native extinction.98

96 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 6. 97 Clark and Cass’s report finally made its way into federal legislation in the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1834. Francis Paul Prucha, Lewis Cass and American Indian Policy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 6-8. 98 U.S. Congress, House, Letter from the Secretary of War transmitting the information required by a Resolution of the House of Representatives of the 15th ultimo in relation to our Indian Affairs Generally, 20th Cong., 2d sess., (1829), 107. Jacksonian era removal discourse grounded the threat of Indian extinction, due to contact with ‘superior’ race, as critical in the benevolence of removal to save Indians from that fate. John T. Fierst, “Rationalizing Removal: Anti-Indianism in Lewis Cass's North American Review Essays,” Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Fall 2010), 13. Theda Perdue, "The Legacy of Indian Removal." The Journal of Southern History vol. 78, no. 1 (February 2012), 18.

In part, the economics of removal separated Indian removal from African colonization. Native removal generated land cessions and public land sales that enlarged state and federal treasuries with its profits. It also increased settler expansion that propelled the development of infrastructure and commerce networks. Alternatively, there was no immediate profit to be made from African colonization. Transatlantic transportation expenses and the potential costs of slaveowner compensated emancipation saddled African colonization with increasing financial disadvantages. Native removal was economically profitable while African colonization was a financially debt ridden enterprise. However, those differences did not sway colonizationists from their larger goal of a white republic, imparted through a rhetoric of benevolence that was driven by their fears of continued violence and strife from the presence of Native Americans and free blacks.

Discourse on Indians and free blacks

Clergy, settlers, judges, local and federal politicians, missionaries, and antislavery proponents advanced the rhetoric of colonization. The discourse of colonization advanced a fictional rhetoric of degradation that validated colonization’s benevolence, absolved white prejudice, and forwarded deportation as the only plausible solution.

General Robert G. Harper, like many early colonizationists, opined that free blacks were inferior and degraded by the color of their skin and their former condition in bondage which created an impenetrable wall between them and white Americans. That barrier was

closed forever by our habits and our feelings, which perhaps it would be more correct to call our prejudices, and which, whether feelings or prejudices, or a mixture of both, make us recoil with horror from the idea of an intimate union with the free blacks, and preclude

the possibility of such a state of equality, between them and us as alone could make us one people.99 In Harper’s estimation, it remained impossible for free blacks to be equal to whites by way of their race or color. They could only have real freedom apart from the United States. Like, Robert

Finley, Henry Clay, Robert Mercer, and other ACS advocates, Harper acknowledged and named the prejudiced faced by free blacks and deemed it wholly insurmountable leaving colonization as the only option for free blacks to “enjoy real equality: in other words, real freedom.”100

ACS discourses on colonization authored rhetorical somersaults and equivocal rationales to support its plan of colonization, much like those offered by Robert Finley. While free blacks were at once damaged in America they were also productive people “whose industry, enterprize, and knowledge of agriculture, and the arts, would render them most useful assistants” in starting a colony in Africa.101 Free blacks were demeaned in an American context, but held potential in regards to their ability to support and maintain a self-sufficient colony in Africa. Colonizationists pushed the emigration plan as both benevolent for free blacks and also as the “removal of a national evil, which all unite in lamenting” that would be the greatest blessing they could give to their future American descendants.102

Isaac McCoy had served as a Baptist missionary to Native bands and espoused a civilizationist view that called for education and support to redeem Native peoples, which prepared them, in anticipation for assimilation into American society. However, by the late

99 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 1 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 14. 100 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 1 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 20. 101 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 4 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 28. 102 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 4 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 28.

1820s McCoy became an Indian colonization convert due to the federal government’s turn exclusively to removal and opposition to earlier civilizationist policy work as the solution to

Native residence and inclusion. McCoy declared that “assuming the guardianship of the Indians, and at the same time admitting the legality of their claims to territory” would not mean they would earn or be endowed with political rights.103 He stated further that “our civil institutions do positively secure the rights of aliens within our territories.”104 The use of the word alien is telling here. While acknowledging Native right to soil and their ability to hold land titles, McCoy branded them as aliens both in a domestic sense within states and in their future residence within

United States territories. Native peoples legally resided in the United States and held inheritance rights for property, but were not of the United States both in a domestic and colonial sense.

Native peoples existed as uniquely and inherently foreign.105

McCoy even went as far as to equate the legal status and rights of Native Americans as to those of minors under the law. McCoy argued that the condition of Native peoples in America was “not a solitary case; the condition of the wretched Africans is fully in point” with the debased state of Native Americans.106 According to McCoy even friends of Native Americans

“who declare themselves to be devoutly in favour of Indian reform, are aware of the extent of

Indian degradation.”107 McCoy expressed his disappointment in the progress of Indians to date, given the poor state in which many Native peoples continued to live. He also offered a necessary

103 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 8. 104 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 8. 105 Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 81-92. 106 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 10. 107 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 11.

53 rebuttal to contemporary claims about Natives not wanting to adopt American life that might lead to a pathway of reduced white prejudice. McCoy stated simply that Native Americans had no place that was free or would be free from white encroachment, instead they were “at best only tenants at the will of our Government.”108

In a similar fashion, Jeremiah Morrow asserted that free blacks were “a distinct caste, rapidly increasing, in the bosom of civil society; a race of men destined by a distinctive and indelible mark of color, to a lasting separation, and yet spread over, and intermixed with, the population, throughout the country.”109 Free blacks were not only supposedly damaged persons, but also an internal evil related to, but not wholly encompassed by the institution of slavery.

Morrow acknowledged the popular notion that in the future it might possible for free blacks to become equals to whites but balked at any idea of a biracial society. In contrast, he believed firmly that “the process of the admixture of the African with the Anglo-Saxon blood—by the amalgamation of the black and the white races of men; this is a supposition I will not consider, we cannot for a moment indulge in the speculation.”110 Morrow adamantly opposed amalgamation and political equality touting colonization as the “only plan to afford relief to them, and to ourselves, which the statesman has devised and the politician recommended, is a separation of this people from our society, and to transport them to a distant land.”111

108 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 12. 109 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 4. 110 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 4. 111 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 4.

Colonization, in his estimation, held potential as the only plan that could service both removed persons and the citizens of the state of Ohio.

Cyrus Edwards declared that colonization had no interest in disrupting slavery and the rights of private property. Speaking euphemistically about slaveowners and slavery Edwards remarked “we have never entertained the purpose of intermeddling with the private property of individuals.”112 In a continuation of the rhetorical battle between colonizationists and abolitionists Edwards denounced abolitionists.113 He argued that “No wild dream of the wildest enthusiast was ever more extravagant than that of turning loose upon society two millions of blacks, idle and therefore worthless, vicious and therefore dangerous, ignorant and therefore incapable of appreciating and enjoying the blessings of freedom.”114 He also rebuked slaveholders and positioned colonization as a moderate path forward that opposed the extremes of both slavery and immediate abolition “whilst it adopts the liberal views of both.”115

Benefit to nonwhites

The fantasies of benevolence were constructed out of the fictions of degradation that concealed the colonizationist goal of a white republic. Colonizationists’ rhetoric on nonwhites forwarded a discourse that allowed them to evade their own prejudice and outward refusal of constructing a multiracial body politic and invent their own benevolence in the process of

112 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 6. 113 Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 3. 114 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 8. 115 Cyrus Edwards, An address delivered at the state house, in Vandalia, on the subject of forming a state colonization society, auxiliary to the American Colonization Society (Jacksonville: James G. Edwards, 1831), 7.

55 colonization. The fictions of benevolence provided cover for colonizationists to push dual schemes of deportation that would forge states in the Northwest as racially homogenous.

According to the ACS, colonization offered a proactive way to slow down and patrol the

Atlantic slave trade on the African coast. They reasoned that a colony in Africa would be the best way to fulfill standards set by the 1819 Slave Trade Act and used that legislation to buttress colonization. Domestically, the ACS supporters also denied the claim that it was a scheme to strengthen slavery by potentially draining off the free black population. Charles Fenton Mercer specifically refuted such claims at the 1824 annual meeting when he remarked that “we have been charged with wishing only to remove our free blacks, that we may the more effectually rivet the chains of the slave. But the class we first seek to remove, are neither freemen nor slaves; but between both, and more miserable than either.”116 When dealing with arguments that the

ACS was an abolitionist organization with intentions to rid the nation of slavery, they often had to refute those claims by reiterating its emphasis solely on the removal of free blacks.

Isaac McCoy, primarily concerned with Native American life, asserted the responsibility the United States held in regard to improving and uplifting Native Americans. He declared that

“the continuance of Indian miseries, is no more a matter of surprise, than the continuance of our prejudices in relation to them. The causes not being removed, improvement in their condition ought not to be anticipated.”117 McCoy expounded further “that on our borders and within our settlements, thousands of these wretched people still exist” which prompted a natural question as

116 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 7 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 12. 117 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 4.

56 to “What ought to be done with them, all things considered?”118 McCoy himself was a recent convert to Indian colonization as a solution in the late 1820s.

McCoy dismissed the idea that the Northwest could be a place for the colony since it was soon to become a valued region within the contiguous United States. He also objected to a

Native colony in proximity to Canada or the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. He instead argued for a far western colony belonging to Native peoples permanently. McCoy reminded his readers

“again, it is never imagined that the Indians will be forced into the colony contrary to their inclinations. And as the business of colonizing, so far as relates to the natives, originates in benevolence, no unrighteous means will be employed to buy the consent of any to remove to the colony.”119

Jeremiah Morrow offered the opening address to an annual meeting of the Ohio colonization society in which he stated their goal was “to remove from us that unfortunate race of men who are now, as aliens on their native soil.”120 Free blacks in Ohio, and throughout the nation, were persons that “never can be admitted to the full enjoyment of those rights as fellow citizens.”121 Removing them would bestow advantages upon them since their supposed degraded nature made their improvement all but inconceivable. Morrow was well aware that “in regard to ourselves, and the interest of the community, the effects would not be less important.”122 The

118 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 8. 119 Isaac McCoy, Remarks on the Practicability of Indian Reform: Embracing Their Colonization; With an Appendix. Second ed. (New-York: Gray and Bunce, 1829), 36. 120 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 3. 121 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 3. 122 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 4.

57 scheme of colonization for auxiliaries in the Northwest rested on the premise that both removed persons and the remaining citizens would mutually benefit from a separation of free blacks and whites.

In 1828, Congressman William McLean of Ohio submitted a report on behalf of the

House Committee of Indian Affairs. In referencing the resolutions of the committee McLean said that their only concern should be “what ought to be done for the preservation and improvement of the Indians?”123 McLean expressed regret over historical interactions between Natives and whites. Despite previous laws enacted, help from missionaries, and general charity these measures had yet to produce wide ranging positive change and he lamented that many Indians were still degraded. McLean’s report stated that the committee was “not to be understood as recommending or approving any coercive measures, on the part of the Government, towards the

Indians, but leaving them free to act, and choose for themselves their future destiny; and that they may be enabled fully to satisfy themselves as to the quality and situation of the country in which it is proposed to locate them.”124 McLean feared that Indians would soon become extinct.

He argued that because of their present situation removal functioned as the only solution that could preserve them.

In February of 1830, the Indiana General Assembly sent a memorial to Congress that requested federal action in removing all of the remaining Native peoples within the state. Except this time, they included the Potawatomi along with the Miami. They estimated that about two thousand people from both Indian nations still resided within the state. The Indiana legislature declared that the Miami and Potawatomi had “neither the knowledge nor the inclination to

123 U.S. Congress, House, Indians Removing Westward, 20th Cong., 1st sess., (1828), 1. 124 U.S. Congress, House, Indians Removing Westward, 20th Cong., 1st sess., (1828), 4.

58 change their native customs, the total extinction of these people seems to be as rapid and inevitable as are the approaches and influence of civilization and improvement upon the forests which they inhabit.”125 Remarkably, they were even more confident in their position on removal a year after submitting their previous memorial for Indian removal as “the benevolent and patriotic views and recommendations of the President of the United States on this subject” made it pointless for them to offer specifics to support their claims.126 The compassion and generosity of the removal scheme had been undeniably established and now the focus should shift to the timing and process of executing removal.

In March 1830, the citizens of Miami County in Ohio also sent a memorial to Congress seeking to remove and colonize local Native Americans in the West. Their memorial argued that

“the Indians of the United States require the special care and protection of Congress to prevent them from utter extinction” and that removal should only occur under the general consent of

Native peoples. Once colonized in the West, a government should be erected over Indians and they should be given permanent title to lands there in this new colony. Petitioners also recommended that other means, usually education, should also be implemented to improve colonized Indians as well.

On December 23, 1833, Reverend James Blythe spoke at the annual meeting of the

Indiana Colonization Society. Blythe served as president of Hanover College, a Presbyterian school in southern Indiana close to the Ohio River about forty miles northeast of Louisville.

125 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report: The Committee on Indian Affairs, to whom was referred the memorial of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, asking the immediate extinguishment of Indian title within the limits of that State 21st Cong., 2d sess., (1831). 126 U.S. Congress, Senate, Report: The Committee on Indian Affairs, to whom was referred the memorial of the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, asking the immediate extinguishment of Indian title within the limits of that State 21st Cong., 2d sess., (1831).

Blythe tendered that the ACS sought to elevate free blacks, emancipation of the enslaved, the establishment of colonies in Africa, and the hope of philanthropists. Blythe believed that the caste situation of free blacks should compel American benevolence to help them. He leaned on

Christian religion and a moral cause to proclaim colonization as morally good for as the

“judicious politician declares, much as he may pity the black man, he cannot, he dare not elevate him to all the civil privileges of our happy country.”127 Blythe saw colonization as a benevolent calling that had to be answered by pious men and saw no option for free blacks other than colonization.

In Indiana, Blythe spoke against slavery and argued that emancipation only freed the enslaved from their masters and made a “mockery of liberty.”128 Free blacks were left unprotected by law and held no means of self-defense. In fact, he contended that “if the legislative enactments of all the states comprising our confederation on the subject of the free people of color be examined, there is not one of them which does not degrade the free black man.”129 Blythe readily acknowledged that part of the degradation levied upon free blacks came by way of discriminatory legislation. He cited recent attempts by the legislatures of Ohio and

Massachusetts to expunge free blacks as illustrative of the “antipathies, which if not growing out of the physical constitution of the two races, certainly are deeply rooted in the very foundations

127 James Blythe, Speech delivered at the Anniversary of the Indiana Colonization Society, on December 23, 1833 (Indianapolis: Bolton & Co., 1834), 6. 128 James Blythe, Speech delivered at the Anniversary of the Indiana Colonization Society, on December 23, 1833 (Indianapolis: Bolton & Co., 1834), 4. 129 James Blythe, Speech delivered at the Anniversary of the Indiana Colonization Society, on December 23, 1833 (Indianapolis: Bolton & Co., 1834), 5.

60 of society, combine with many legislative arts of our common country, to degrade and press down the unhappy black man among us.”130

Colonizationists reconciled their rhetoric of latent black skill and capabilities that would be useful to uplift Africa, with rhetoric that dictated that free blacks were degraded in America by centralizing white prejudice. In essence, free blacks were capable of virtuous civic responsibility, but white prejudice precluded them from becoming equals in America. Therefore, by removing them from rampant white racism they would be free to become autnomous equals in Africa.

Colonizationists reasoned that nonwhites would be interested in the plan of colonization due to the nature of their lives in America, primarily attributed to white prejudice.

Colonizationists readily acknowledged that white prejudice was an impediment to the economic mobility and prosperity of both free blacks and Native communities. As such, they figured that this intractable white racism would compel nonwhites to urgently press forward with any opportunity to escape white prejudice and move to spaces where they would be free to participate actively in their own governance and be accepted as social and political equals.

The ideology of colonization prioritized the benefit rendered to the nation in the removal of free blacks and Native Americans that would forge a white republic. Colonization represented perhaps the last hope to fulfill Jefferson’s vision of an empire of liberty populated by independent white yeoman farmers. Proponents of both Indian removal and African colonization

130 James Blythe, Speech delivered at the Anniversary of the Indiana Colonization Society, on December 23, 1833 (Indianapolis: Bolton & Co., 1834), 5.

61 were deeply concerned with population demographics and feared a future of slavery’s expansion and a continued Native presence, which made it increasingly difficult to appropriate Indian lands safely without provoking violent conflict. The ideology of colonization that appropriated fictions of degradation to validate its own benevolence, and most consistently exhibited a compromise with white supremacy that masqueraded as progressive racial benevolence. However, it is important to remember Susan Ryan’s assertion that “self-interest, in this formulation, is not the opposite of genuine benevolence but rather its complement.”131 Colonization represented a safety valve for land appropriation, slavery, abolition, multiracial inclusion, and white racism.

Advocates consistently conceded white intransigence was a primary factor in inhibiting nonwhites from rising to social, moral, and political equals in America.

The purported benevolence of colonization was simultaneously a mask for its exemption and protection of white supremacy laid bare through its unique ability to unite Americans with multiple disparate views on Natives and free blacks. The consistent principle of colonization, for both Native removal and the ACS, was the benefit rendered to the nation by removing nonwhites and its vision for a future of a safe and prosperous nation produced through the resultant homogeneity. Colonization proponents acknowledged that nonwhite exclusions persisted due to white racism but offered the removal of nonwhites as the most plausible solution. Alternatively, free blacks, Native Americans, and anticolonization allies argued precisely that they were capable of civic responsibilities and republican virtue within the United States. They countered that their biggest obstacle was the very same prejudice that colonization advocates had determined was intractable and rhetorically used to galvanize support for the colonization cause.

131 Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003), 4.

Colonization promoted a racial nationalism by campaigning for a safe and homogenous nation free of slavery, unseemly free blacks, and dangerous Native Americans while preserving

American post-colonial claims to benevolence and morality. Supporters of colonization promoted the twin projects in terms of peace and safety for society and believed that they served the public interests, which made their removal goals benevolent, reasonable, and good.

CHAPTER 3 “TO COLONIZE THIS UNFORTUNATE RACE OF MEN:” TOWARD A POLICY OF REMOVAL IN THE OLD NORTHWEST

In 1831, the Indiana General Assembly elected John Tipton to the U.S. Senate by to finish out the term of James Noble who died in office. Tipton was re-elected as a Jacksonian

Democrat to a full term the following year in 1832. John Tipton, born in Tennessee in 1786, had migrated to Indiana in 1807. He had served in the militia fighting at the Battle of Tippecanoe and during the War of 1812. He then became an Indiana state representative and an Indian agent for the Miami and Potawatomi of Indiana in 1823, based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. During his time as

Indian agent, he served as a commissioner to several Indian treaties that garnered land cessions within Indiana. These experiences served him well in the Senate where he participated on, and later headed, the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs.

In 1836, while the state of Indiana was embroiled in the process of Native removal and treaty negotiations, Tipton reported on behalf of the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs in reference to a proposed bill to supplement the 1830 Removal Act. In the report, Tipton and the committee ruminated on the failures to propel Native people “to the rank of civilized man” despite the “desire of the Government of the United States to perpetuate the existence of the aboriginal inhabitants” of the nation.132 Tipton’s report cited four reasons for this failure: Indian addiction to alcohol, Indian proclivities for violence, “inordinate fondness for the hunter state,” and Indians’ virtual opposition to self improvement.133 In the committee’s assessment the various

132 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 1. 133 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 1.

64 methods that Americans had employed to help sustain, develop, and improve Native life had failed due to Indians’ aversion to acclimate themselves to American ideals of civilization.

In remarks about the long and continued tide of Indian dispossession Tipton’s report stated bluntly that, “Our necessities compelled us to take the country which we inhabit” and

“while we plead justification in taking the country because we could not live without it, justice requires that ample remuneration should be made to the aboriginal occupants.”134 Senator Tipton expressed the necessity of dispossession for American interests, which he lamented, but affirmed that the process incurred a debt to be paid to Native people. Tipton’s formulation of Native dispossession exhibited colonizationist ideology that prioritized the benefit rendered to the nation even as he bemoaned that American commitments to uplift Indians “had not been rewarded with success proportioned to the benevolence which prompted them.”135 In continuing with the benefits removal would accrue for the U.S. Tipton proclaimed, “If we should give them [Indians] the facilities to improvement which are essential to our own preservation in a state of civilization, we should do what has not yet been done for them; if, then, they should perish, we should be clear; we had performed our duty.”136 However, “if the experiment should be successful, and the Indians should become elevated to the comforts of civilization, it would add a page to our history that would be read with satisfaction to the end of time.”137 Tipton articulated that Indians’ protection and assimilation aligned with American interests in Native dispossession.

In perceiving Indian assimilation as a corollary to dispossession, he prioritized the benefits that would accrue to the nation and then secondarily trickle down to Native people. In this manner,

134 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 7-8. 135 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 1. 136 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 8. 137 U.S. Congress, Senate, Exchange of lands with Indians removal of Indians 24th Cong., 1st sess., (1836), 8.

65 the benevolence of dispossession would be maintained as it shifted the assessment for American goodwill from equal inclusion to imprecise efforts at uplift that ignored Native will, and abdicated American responsibility for the ultimate outcome.

The benevolence of colonization ideology could be preserved in the midst of forced removal because Native deportations presented the dual opportunity to accrue land for the nation, while conceptually providing space and extended time for Native people to continue efforts to assimilate. Removal supported and protected American interests and American ideas about

Native interests.

This chapter explores how, after the War of 1812, settlers and politicians of the Old

Northwest sought to solve their perceived problem of a continued Native presence in the region.

In this chapter, I argue that dispossession, as an expression of colonizationist ideology, evolved to become exclusively orchestrated through removal because Native peoples negotiated through treaties to assert themselves as autonomous equals in the developing Northwest. Their measured adaptations to civilizationist rhetoric contrasted claims of Indian degradation that supported preemption rights for squatters and land cessions that generated revenue from land sales.138

Before the War of 1812, United States diplomats dispossessed Natives in the Old

Northwest of their land without requiring their removal. After ceding land to the U.S. several

138 By civilizationist rhetoric I am referring to the discourse, and specifically, the trepidations and fears from federal officials in the Office of Indian Affairs and the Department of War, about Native capabilities under the established civilization policy. Civilization policy had been initiated in the 1790s by Secretary of War Henry Knox as official policy that would seek to introduce and acclimate Native nations to “civilization” as preparation for their ostensible inclusion as citizens of equal standing within the nation. Hallmarks of the civilization policy included a reordering of gender roles, singular property ownership, patriarchal families, an end to extensive hunting grounds, Christian religion, and English literacy. In the early nineteenth century manual labor boarding schools for Indian children was a primary site for the goal of civilization policy to cultivate these Anglo-American centric practices. See Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10-13. Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 50-54.

Native nations, such as the Wyandot, Miami, and Shawneee, broke into smaller bands. Some bands, like those of the Delaware, opted to emigrate west. Others, such as bands of the Wyandot,

Miami, and Potawatomi chose to stay on smaller reserves and remain in Ohio and Indiana. Thus, some of these early treaties, while not specifically calling for removal from the Old Northwest, resulted in a dispersal of Native peoples either west of the Mississippi River, onto smaller reserves, or into shared lands under the ownership of neighboring Native nations.139 This type of dispersal had the effect of reducing the population size and shifting the densities of Native

American communities in Ohio and Indiana. Dispersal optically achieved the same effects for which removal proponents later agitated in the 1830s. In effect, the negotiation, outcomes, and operations of these earlier treaties employed multiple strategies of creating reserves, land allotments, and paying large annuities to further dispossession without requiring Native removal.

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, white Americans perceived Native Americans in the

Old Northwest, whether they had been allied to the British during the war or not, as a continued threat. As a result, when they negotiated postwar treaties Americans sought to remedy this perceived threat and remove Native nations from the Old Northwest.140 Incongruously, at the same time the U.S. sought to purchase the loyalty and deference of Native bands through gifts and annuities to detach them from their alliance with the British. The long history of Indian treaties in the Northwest aimed to appropriate Native land through land cessions and avoid future

139 Post war of 1812 treaties with Native nations in Ohio were disputed on the grounds that some reserves for Native peoples were lands that various bands Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot, and Delaware had already reserved for each other in the context of a history where land sharing complicated singular claims of ownership and recognition of the validity of land cessions and treaties. Sami Lakoma’ki, ‘‘Our Line’’ The Shawnees, the United States, and Competing Borders on the Great Lakes ‘‘Borderlands,’’ 1795–1832” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 34, No. 4, (Winter 2014), 601-603. 140 Karim M. Tiro, “The View from Piqua Agency: The War of 1812, the White River Delawares, and the Origins of Indian Removal,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 35, No. 1, (Spring 2015), 26.

67 conflict by cultivating a favorable Native opinion of the United States as opposed to British

Canada.

The War of 1812 and the Indian alliances with the British against the United States provoked a reassessment of Indian policy and the proposed incorporation of Native peoples as citizens within the nation. Removal emerged after the War of 1812 as a replacement for a patchwork of other inefficient dispossession policies that evidently had not served to ingratiate

Indians with American dominance or quell the potential for Native violence against American citizens. Native removal from the Old Northwest was an effective method of dispossession that drew a hard boundary around an all white polity that also functioned as tool of state building. In response, Native bands endeavored to oppose continued land cessions and sought inclusion to preserve their communities and residence on their land through strategic adaption in treaty negotiations. Removal prioritized the benefit to white citizens who illegally settled on Indian lands and demanded the ability to purchase that property. Secondarily removal sought to bring peace to the frontier by deporting Indians to appropriately racialized spaces free from squatters and white encroachment.

A significant amount of removal scholarship has focused on the South and the removal of the Five Civilized Tribes, specifically the Cherokee.141 In the South, removal and dispossession helped to pave the way for slavery to expand throughout the Deep South. Recent scholarship has

141 For a representative sampling see, Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson & his Indian wars (New York : Viking, 2001). Anthony F.C. Wallace, “The Obtaining Lands: Thomas Jefferson and the Native Americans,” in James P. Ronda, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West (1997), 25-41. Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). Michael Green, The politics of Indian removal: Creek government and society in crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). Ronald Satz, American Indian policy in the Jacksonian era (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1976). Theda Perdue, "The Legacy of Indian Removal." The Journal of Southern History vol. 78, no. 1 (February 2012), 3-36.

68 taken a renewed focus on dispossession and removal in the Old Northwest. As historian John

Bowes’s has argued, removal in the North had similarities with the well-studied story of removal in the South, as well as points of departure that mark the Northern story as unique.142 Three differences stand out. First, in the South, the expansion of slavery was the driving force for removal of the Cherokees and other Indian nations. In the Old Northwest, the expansion of slavery was not a factor, but removal nonetheless facilitated the growth of American settlement and commerce in the region.143 Native governance and policies dictating dispossession had federal endorsement but ultimately executed by local commissioners, agents, and politicians in the Old Northwest.

Second, white Americans insisted that removal was in the best interests of Natives. The

Removal Act provided moral cover and legitimacy to coercion and forcible removal. No longer did local citizens and politicians seek to negotiate through treaty councils for land cessions and seemingly amicable relations with Native people who endeavored to remain in the Northwest.

The Removal Act legitimated the purported benevolence of violent and forcible expulsion of

142 Bowes argued that removal in the Old Northwest was so varied, fragmented, and complex that no singular narrative of removal could adequately account for the events of Potawatomi, Delaware, Shawnee, or Wyandot removals. Those histories transgress tidy narratives or chronologies bounded by the Removal Act or the Black Hawk War. John P. Bowes, Land too good for Indians: northern Indian removal (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 6. 143 Campion argued that it took roughly two decades to complete the transformation of Indian territory in Northern Indiana into an authentic American space ending in 1855. The Shawnees drew their own borders around their lands in the region and had to redraw these borders in the midst of rapid change in Ohio. Stockwell wrote a synthesis of Ohio removals that situated Monroe’s administration and the aftermath of the War of 1812 as a flashpoint that began an expansive removal period. Thomas Campion, “Indian Removal and the Transformation of Northern Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 107, No. 1 (MARCH 2011), 33. Sami Lakoma’ki, ‘‘Our Line’’ The Shawnees, the United States, and Competing Borders on the Great Lakes ‘‘Borderlands,’’ 1795–1832” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 34, No. 4, (Winter 2014), 597-598. Mary Stockwell, The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Tribes (Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2014), 73. For more histories of the region see Daniel P. Barr, ed., The boundaries between us: natives and newcomers along the frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750-1850 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.). Charles Beatty-Medina, and Melissa Rinehart eds., Contested Territories: Native Americans and Non-natives in the Lower Great Lakes, 1700–1850 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012).

Indians from the northwest. As Bowes argued, scholars ought not to centralize the 1830 Removal

Act in histories of Native removal because “that approach has at times obscured more than it has illuminated” and created pitfalls of legal debates that eclipse longer chronologies of removal.144

After the War of 1812, as Americans clamored for the peaceful transfer of Native lands into

American hands, removal gradually superseded many competing ideas for expansion and land acquisition because it preserved the character of American benevolence. In the rhetoric of benevolence I lean heavily on the work of Susan Ryan who seeks to move beyond value judgments of whether the actions of antebellum civil society organizations worked toward positive or negative ends and instead try to understand and tease out how Americans, and those seeking to become American, constructed, deployed, and reconstructed the rhetoric of benevolence.145 In relation to removal policy and Indian affairs governance, the trope of benevolence provided moral cover for the shifting and inexact, and most often exploitive, nature of American and Indian relations in the early nineteenth century.

In short, removal resolved the immorality of massive coordinated exercises in Native

American dispossession with a measured concern for the future prospects of Native American life and a pronounced anxiety about American benevolence in its Indian policies. The process of removal exacted multiple forms of violence across geography, time, and history as Native

Americans were perpetually reinvented as uncivilized, consolidated on reserves, written out of history, and relegated to the borders of the nation spatially and politically in policies declared to preserve their existence and protect them from detrimental contact with white squatters and

144 John P. Bowes, American Indian removal beyond the Removal Act Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association vol. 1 no. 1 (Spring 2014), 66. 145 Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003), 22-23.

70 settlers. Scholar James Buss noted that the myth of the disappearing Indian in the Old Northwest has served as its creation story in both literature and historical scholarship as “this moment of erasure (a form of literary genocide) has marked a transitional moment from the region’s colonial past to one of statehood development.”146 The erasure that subsumed into the Northwest’s moment of birth as a distinctly American space buttressed the supposed benevolence of removal policy.

Erasure and reconstruction of Indians in American history plays a significant role in how removal was critical to state development and nationalism, inclusive of, but not limited to, the violent accrual of Native land. In Firsting and Lasting, Jean O'Brien discusses how

(re)constructing Indians as pre-modern helped literary and historical authors situate themselves and their communities that “claimed to be the first people who established cultures and institutions worthy of notice. Thereby subtly declaring the invalidity of Indian ways of life.”147

Authors used Indians as a literary tools to substantiate their own claims to modernity. Although

O’Brien is specifically talking about New England, I think that the language of Indian agents and politicians in the Northwest appropriate the same goals and methods.

The myth of Indian disappearance is significant for as Buss elaborated the picture of a western settler “has propped up a powerful American narrative about western expansion, an inclusive American democracy, and unlimited national progress while disempowering and

146 James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with words: language and conquest in the lower Great Lakes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 6. Jason Pierce argued further out in the trans Mississippi west settlers envisioned the region as a refuge for Anglo-Americans free from eastern immigrants as a place for them even as “the mythology obscured the presence of Indians, Hispanics, and Asians in California and the Southwest.” Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the creation of the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), ix. 147 Jean M O'Brien, Firsting and lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press 2010) xxi-xxiii.

71 dispossessing America's indigenous peoples by historicizing them and writing them out of a narrative of modernization and progress.”148 Solutions for the presence of Native Americans in the Old Northwest moved from demarcated land reserves to mass removal because it maintained

American benevolence while enabling the continued accrual of Native lands. Removal was part of a longer process of Native dispossession that ultimately preserved notions of American benevolence.

Third, and most importantly, removal in the Old Northwest sought to create an all-white polity. Certainly Indian lands was the much-desired goal of removal as policy. However, to focus strictly on the acquisition of land, conceals Native reactions to incessant land cessions in treaty negotiations. Some Native bands sought to preserve sovereignty above all and therefore opted to cede their land possessions and emigrate based on the stipulation that new lands in the west would be theirs in perpetuity and safe from white squatters and their frequent intrusions.

However, other bands sought to end cessions of land and become property owners just like their white neighbors who purchased previously ceded Indian lands from the federal government. That aspiration to become equals while maintaining possession of their large reserves accelerated the ascendancy of removal as the preferred method of dispossession. In effect, the goal of creating a racially homogenous body of citizens took precedence that prioritized removal over previous negotiated methods through treaties that successfully garnered land cessions.

Dispossession and removal used the law as its primary tool for transferring Native lands into American hands that facilitated westward expansion. Dispossession through law also functioned to construct and harden the borders of American national identity and white racial

148 James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with words: language and conquest in the lower Great Lakes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 5.

72 identity.149 These borders then became critical components of political ideology that justified the racialized borders of inclusion within the nation.150 The Removal Act did not create new desires for land and Native dispossession. Instead, it absolved the violence of dispossession and gunpoint diplomacy.

Post War of 1812

The Treaty of Ghent formally ended the War of 1812 in December 1814. The war had lasting effects for the relationships between Native Americans and the states and territories of the

Old Northwest. Continued fighting attributed to the war lasted well into 1815. Illinois territorial governor Ninian Edwards, Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison, and settlers in these Northwest Territories aimed for a quick path to political autonomy, which required an influx of eastern or southern white Americans to fulfill the population requirements to apply for statehood.151 The end of armed conflict with regional Native bands and safe borders were critical to attracting new settlers and their families to the Northwest and advancing from territorial governance into the sovereignty of statehood.

149 Roediger pushes for studies of whiteness to break a black/white binary that can incorporate texts on settler colonialism. David Roediger “The Pursuit of Whiteness: Property, Terror, and Expansion, 1790-1860.” Journal of Early Republic Vol. 19, No. 4, (Winter 1999), 594. Stuart banner reminds us that land transfers always consisted of “elements of law and elements of power” and that “whites always acquired Indian land in a legal framework of their own construction.” Stuart Banner, How the Indians lost their land: law and power on the frontier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. 150 Reginald Horsman, Race and manifest destiny: the origins of American racial anglo-saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 189-207. 151 Harrison used both violence and treaties to execute land cessions to further expansion in the region. Robert M. Owens, “Jeffersonian Benevolence on the Ground: The Indian Land Cession Treaties of William Henry Harrison” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 22, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), 405-435.

In the immediate aftermath of the War of 1812, treaty commissioners successfully negotiated for land cessions that did not stipulate removal as a part of treaties with Native nations. In 1815, following the end of the war, the Department of War pursued diplomatic relations with several Native bands of the Northwest. At this time, the primary objective of the

United States was to establish peace with various Native nations of the Northwest as well as for

Native Americans to recognize the thorough establishment of American power in the region.

American officials preferred peaceable resolutions to renewed violent conflict with Indians, but they also held no qualms about the use of armed force to achieve this goal. President Madison appointed William Henry Harrison, Duncan McArthur, and John Graham as commissioners to negotiate treaties with Native Americans in the Northwest, but also asserted that he would use military force, if necessary, to bring peace to the region.152 Harrison, Graham, and McArthur brought relevant experiences to the negotiations. John Graham was a lawyer. Harrison had previously served as Indiana Territorial Governor and a prominent general in the War of 1812.

McArthur had served as a soldier and fought against Indians in the Northwest in the 1790s, before becoming a wealthy land speculator and Ohio state representative for over twenty years.

McArthur would later become a U.S. congressman and an Adams-Republican governor of Ohio.

Throughout most of the year of 1815, there was constant worry and suspicion amongst appointed treaty commissioners that the hesitation and reluctance of Native nations to negotiate treaties was caused by anti-American distrust sewed amongst the Indians by British traders. The

British and their influence in the Great Lakes region was a constant menace to the United

States.153 Even though the British had conceded in the recent war, Americans still feared that the

152 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1-25. 153 Robert M. Owens, Red dreams, white nightmares : pan-Indian alliances in the Anglo-American mind, 1763-1815 (Norman, OK : University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 235-237.

British military and traders incited Native Americans to resist American rule in the region and held considerable influence over Native Americans. Treaty commissioners also had to manage relations amongst Native bands and between Native Americans and settlers in the Northwest.

The Wyandot of Ohio complained of having intruders settle on their lands and having their animals hunted by trespassers. Indian commissioners also ran afoul of the Wyandot by approving a road that would run through Wyandot lands they had specifically reserved for the Senecas.154

While the Northwest was now internationally recognized as a solely American possession, on the ground in Ohio and the surrounding territories the majority of these lands belonged to Native nations such as the Wyandot, Fox, Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Miami to name a few. The numerous federal treaties with Native nations in the region suggested that the U.S. recognized their right of ownership even as it planned and executed measures to expropriate Native lands.

Commissioners Harrison, McArthur, and Graham negotiated a treaty with various nations of the Northwest inclusive of the Shawnee, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Miami, and the Delaware in

1815. In this treaty the United States tendered peace to the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa who all agreed to acquiesce to American power and protection in exchange for the restoration of their rights and privileges according to their standing in 1811 before the outbreak of war with

Great Britain. The U.S. also acknowledged the loyalty of several nations and pardoned some

Native American chiefs. The Wyandot, Shawnee, Miami, and a few other nations agreed to abide by all previously negotiated treaties stretching back to the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. The

Greeneville treaty had marked a shift in power in the Northwest as Native nations conceded defeat to General Anthony Wayne and signed a treaty that effectively ceded most of the state of

154 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 1-25.

Ohio to the United States. However, the new boundary lines outlined by the treaty had little effect on stemming the tide white encroachment onto Indian lands in the region.155

As early as 1815, there was an expressed desire amongst Ohioans to have an extinguishment of all Indian land title within the state. Settlers from Indiana and Illinois territories petitioned for the right of pre-emption and new laws that would empower them to legally purchase the lands that they had settled on as squatters.156 Throughout both Indiana and

Illinois territories squatters repeatedly petitioned Congress to allow them to remain on the unsold portions of public lands that they had taken up residence on and preferred not to be ejected from them. In Illinois Territory, Native Americans received some protections against both squatters and dangerous traders. Native communities had the right to eject squatters off their land and to detain unlicensed traders. These rights were delegated as orders to Indian commissioners by way of the Secretary of War. In early 1816, the House Committee on Public Lands rejected petitions from squatters in Indiana and Illinois Territory that asked for the ability to purchase lands on which they had already settled in violation of the law. President Madison had also made a recent proclamation that all squatters on public lands were to be forcibly removed most likely to preserve peaceful relations with Natives and control land sales.

155 Colin G. Calloway, Pen and ink witchcraft : treaties and treaty making in American Indian history (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 107-113. 156 I aim to use squatters as a descriptive term intentionally to complicate the used of settler. The difference between squatters and settlers was a matter of legality that depended on whether the federal government recognized their right to purchase lands upon which they lived. This legality should also be considered in context of treaties that yielded legal ownership of lands to native bands. In doing so, it opens question about both terminology and ownership for settlers and squatters living on land federally recognized as owned by native peoples either individually or collectively. My thinking is influenced by Jensen’s conclusion on pre-emption laws that “For all intents and purposes, Congress had officially transformed squatting on the public domain from a criminal, if common, practice to a statutorily guaranteed legal right. In doing so, it had simultaneously transformed depraved, lawless squatters into legitimate. brave frontiersmen: the virtuous "actual settlers" of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.” Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 176.

Locally, both petitioners and their federal representatives disagreed with ejecting squatters from public lands. Congressman John McLean of Ohio wrote to Secretary of State

James Monroe in January of 1816 asking for an alternative solution to ejecting squatters on unsold public lands.157 McLean acknowledged that squatters had illegally settled on these lands, but alleged that most, if any at all, of these squatters had no idea they were settling illegally on public lands and thus breaking the law. Squatters had expected pre-emption rights to quickly follow them taking up residence on these lands or that “they would be tolerated in their residence.”158 He insisted that settlers were actually performing a public service by making improvements which may lead to higher land sale values for the federal government. Several people from Ohio had already sold their farms to move to Indiana territory to buy bigger plots of land. McLean argued that “in the South, some measure of this character may be necessary, to prevent lawless intruders from forming combinations prejudicial to the sales of public lands” but in the Northwest territories this was not a problem.159 Northwestern congressmen like McLean were primarily concerned with their constituents ability to expand onto expropriated Native lands. McLean even suggested that squatters had survived war and Indian hostilities only to have their prosperity be dismantled by their own government. Squatters in the Northwest interpreted any federal action against their illegal residency as a betrayal as the nation chose to defend and protect Native and public lands against their assumed entitled right of settlement and occupancy.

Historian Laura Jensen argued that the federal government had a choice “of whether to use U.S. military force against its own citizens or Native Americans on the western frontier, the

157 In 1829 McLean was nominated by President Jackson to the United States Supreme Court where he served for over thirty years. 158 Territorial Papers of the United States Vol, VIII (Washington, D.C., 1934), 375. 159 Territorial Papers of the United States Vol, VIII (Washington, D.C., 1934), 374.

Government chose the latter, forgoing a policy of assimilation for one of Indian ‘removal.’”160

For settlers in the Old Northwest American expansion and nationalism amounted to a zero sum game in which either squatters or Native Americans would win or lose with Native land, public federal lands, and Indian polices compressed in the middle.

From both a federal and local level there was an imperative to annex Native lands in the

Northwest. By 1816, President Madison was formulating ideas around removing Native

Americans in the Old Northwest and granting them some form of payment in equivalent value for their land claims. Madison was cautious not to advise regional Indian commissioners to immediately seek more land cessions. Instead, for the time being he wanted commissioners to express to Native Americans that his feelings of generosity towards them would only last so far as they did not take up arms against the United States. Madison wanted to make clear to Native

Americans that aggression on their part would not be tolerated and would not influence his future decisions regarding them or future treaty processes.161

While the federal lust for Native lands began thinking in terms of removal, the local quest to expand and appropriate Native lands remained content with negotiated land cessions through treaties. Perhaps due to the ever-present fear of renewed squatter-Native conflict. In 1816,

Shawnee bands became worried because they were hearing rumors that the U.S. aspired to attain their land. They relayed these concerns to Duncan McArthur who informed them that he knew of no current governmental plans to attain their land, but that he would investigate on their behalf.

160 Jensen described the U.S. western settlement policies, adopted following the Revolution, designed to acquire Native lands either by purchase or coercion, regulate trade, establish peaceful relations with Native Americans, and demarcate boundaries in the interests of both Native assimilation and American expansion as largely a failure. Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150. 161 The Territorial papers of the United States vol. VIII (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1934), 374- 375.

Unbeknownst to the Shawnee, McArthur saw this as a prime opportunity. He then wrote to

Secretary of War William Crawford that, “I have thought that when they are called together for the purpose of having their claims settled, a favorable opportunity will be presented to ascertain their disposition relative to selling their lands in this State, without letting them know that

Government has a wish to purchase.”162 McArthur sought to exploit the Shawnee fear of

American land grabs as an opportunity to coax the Shawnees into further land cessions despite not having a federal order to pursue land cessions at the time from either the President or the

Department of War.

The trajectory of Native dispossession in the Northwest began to change in 1817 after

President James Monroe took office in March. Between 1817 and 1818 the U.S. negotiated treaties that acquired huge swaths of land in Ohio, central Indiana, and lower Michigan territory.

Although President Monroe had just recently taken office he had already been lobbied by Ohio

Congressmen to extinguish all Native titles to land within the state.

Acting Secretary of War George Graham informed Lewis Cass that the President was of the opinion that it was a good idea to extinguish all Indian land title in Ohio. Graham instructed

Cass to gauge Native interest in potential land cessions. In these potential cessions, Native

Americans would have the option to take a piece of land that could be passed down to their descendants but owned by one person, or take an allotment of land west of Mississippi River.

This potential negotiation was to be unlike previous treaties and overall sought to have connected

American lands between the state of Ohio and the Michigan Territory. According to Graham this was not to be a forced removal of Native peoples. He envisioned it as an optional emigration

162 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 127-148.

79 with the understanding that “negotiation should be founded on the basis that each head of a family who wishes to remain within the limits ceded should have a life estate in a reservation of a certain number of acres, which should descend to his children in fee” and “that those who do not wish to remain on those terms should have a body of land allotted to them on the west of the

Mississippi.”163 In April of 1817, Cass responded back to Graham saying that Native Americans in Ohio would cede their lands. Cass was unsure about what terms Native bands would want or accept, but that no matter the terms it paled in comparison to the monetary and political value of the lands that would be obtained. Graham then authorized McArthur and Cass to proceed with obtaining land cessions from Native nations in Ohio. Graham articulated that Cass should seek an extinguishment to Indian title throughout all of Ohio, but if not then he should focus his efforts on land cessions in northwest Ohio lands to make the region continuous with U.S. held lands in the Michigan territory.

In September of 1817, appointed commissioners Lewis Cass and Duncan McArthur finalized a treaty in which the Potawatomi and Wyandot agreed to cede lands to the United

States. In exchange for land cessions, the Potawatomi, Wyandot, and Shawnee received annual annuity payments in specie. The U.S. agreed to special reserves and land in fee simple for chiefs.

The treaty also made special grants of land to former Indian captives who chose to continue living with their former captors, mixed race individuals, children of deceased chiefs, and Native

Americans who fought alongside Americans in the War of 1812. One significant new stipulation in the treaty ordered an Indian agent to live amongst Native communities to protect them and manage relations with the surrounding white populace. The U.S. reserved the right to make roads through these Native reserves in the future and that the land would not be taxed so long as it

163 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 127-148.

80 belonged to Native Americans. The treaty also stipulated that part of the Wyandot grant was to be used to support a school and that all lands needed to be broken up and allotted to individuals separately as named in the treaty and not as one big communal block.164

This treaty comprised a mix of several elements including Native land cessions, annuity payments, Native reserves, special land allotments for band chiefs, Native hunting rights, and tax exemptions for Native land. These early treaties represented dispossession efforts in which the

US acquired Native lands but conceded rights that later treaties would not. Native chiefs also negotiated for the ability to sell their lands to whomever they wanted. This right of absolute ownership and conveyance meant that land in the Northwest could be sold to land speculators, squatters, other Native Americans, or perhaps even foreign interests like troublesome British traders. This 1817 treaty shows that early Northwest treaties in the aftermath of the War of 1812 employed several methods that helped acquire Native lands that did not involve removal as a necessary stipulation. These treaties in fact still employed methods that can be aligned with an older method of Native assimilationist ideas extending from civilizationist policy.

These early treaties in the aftermath of the War of 1812 employed several different methods in the efforts to maintain peace in the Old Northwest, ingratiate the loyalty of Native nations, and appease both legal and illegal white residents. Through squatters’ quest for preemption rights, fear of the British agitating Native peoples into violence against the U.S., and the general quest to appropriate Native lands, federal officials and local Indian commissioners invented Native peoples as native born aliens within the process of dispossession and early formations of removal thought.

164 Charles Joseph Kappler, ed. Indian Affairs Laws and Treaties Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C., 1904), 145-155.

Both Secretary of War John Calhoun and Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass, who had been charged as an Indian commissioner to negotiate and execute several treaties in the

Northwest, envisioned that part of the goal of land cessions had to create continuous white settlements, along with confined and condensed Native communities. In this regard, negotiated treaties served dual purposes of acquiring native lands as well as altering the physical and geographical locations of borders in the interests of white settlements throughout the Northwest.

Indian commissioners and treaties sought to cartographically and demographically turn Indian territories into American spaces.

However, Native nations were not as pleased with the outcome of the 1817 treaty. They made a request to extend and enlarge their reserves. In response to mounting Native complaints, and most likely wanting to avoid armed conflict, Senator Jeremiah Morrow of Ohio, who served on the Senate Committee on Public Lands, proposed amendments to the 1817 treaty. The

Wyandot had objected to the land reserved for them saying that it was too small and on bad soil, which would inhibit their ability to become farmers. Some Native leaders traveled to

Washington, D.C. to submit their grievances and agitate for better treaty stipulations. One amendment proposed was to increase the land reserved for Wyandot chiefs to remedy their complaints. Senator Morrow also proposed to end the allowance from the previous treaty that empowered chiefs to sell their land allotments to anyone they chose without authorization from any government official or Indian agent.165 Morrow sought American control of Indian lands even when they were not part of land cessions.

165 Shannon Bontrager has argued that this was one of the ways that Native Americans were developing new methods to retain sovereignty through constructing new borders. Shannon Bontrager, " From a Nation of Drunkards, We Have Become a Sober People": The Wyandot Experience in the Ohio Valley during the Early Republic." Journal of the Early Republic vol. 32, no. 4 (Winter 2012), 616.

The 1818 treaty with the Wyandot made land grants from the previous 1817 treaty that created reserves to function like other previous Native reserves and only for the use of the specifically named recipients unless ceded to the U.S. It also made additional land reserves to

Wyandots that conjoined with pre-existing reserves. It also ended the ability for grants to individuals, in the previous 1817 treaty, to be conveyed by grantees or heirs to anyone unless pre-approved by the President. In the same 1818 treaty, the Potawatomi ceded lands to the U.S. and the U.S. agreed to pay the Potawatomi a perpetual annual annuity of $2500. The Miami nation also ceded lands to the U.S. and the treaty created six separate reservations for the Miami.

Treaties served as evidence that removal was not entirely about taking possession of

Indian lands. It was also about the drive to remake the Northwest into racially homogenous spaces. Treaties as a method of dispossession were successful although inefficient, as Native people asserted their interests, as much as they could, in treaty negotiations. Indians and their agents also were adept at holding Indian officials accountable to previous treaties and their specific stipulations of annuities and reserves. This required the policing and expulsion of squatters. Even though squatters continually ignored treaties and land boundaries to take up residence on Indian lands.

Wyandot, Potawatomi, Shawnee and other nations attempted to work within the dominant civilizationist discourse of early America in the hopes of maintaining autonomy, community, culture, and land. They also received support from Christian missionaries who saw their persoanl civilization mission as important to both the nation and their faith. Missionaries dispersed themselves throughout the nation opening schools and instructing Native Americans in

83 agriculture, English, and the Bible. These missionaries determined that Native Americans were in fact capable of improving and attaining their definition of what civilized meant.166

In the Northwest and throughout the nation, Christian reformers who espoused the merits of the civilizing mission wrote to Congress to persuade them not to abandon them and their missionary efforts. Missionaries described Native Americans as on the brink of extinction and that previous individual efforts at helping them improve had failed. They argued for civilization efforts that used monies appropriated as part of the 1819 Civilization Fund Act. Missionaries thought that their efforts would have a positive effect and that Native Americans could be civilized. Missionaries including the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions envisioned their work as a debt to be paid to Native Americans.167

Changes in 1820s

In the 1820s, federal rhetoric shifted about the contemporary place of Native Americans in the nation and the prospects for their future, most likely influenced by President Monroe’s support for mass removal. Much of this federal change was driven by mounting tensions between the Cherokee and the state of Georgia, but repercussions of those battles had consequences for

Native nations in the Old Northwest as well.168 Increasingly Native people attempted to negotiate through civilizationist rhetoric to resist land sales and calls for Native removal.

166 George A. Schultz, An Indian Canaan : Isaac McCoy and the vision of an Indian state (Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 78-100. 167 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 446-448. 168 John P. Bowes, Land too good for Indians: northern Indian removal (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 59-65.

In the mid-1820s at the dusk of his two terms, President Monroe began a hard push for mass removal of Native Americans. In his last annual message to Congress in December of

1824, he stated that Native Americans in other places outside of the Northwest were making progress towards civilization thanks to governmental efforts, but that Northwest Indians remained hostile and were fighting each other.169

President Monroe urged Congress to pass removal legislation that would enable him to appoint commissioners to carry out the task. Monroe argued that removal was a positive good in the interests of happiness for Native Americans. He was also clear to note that the immediate benefit to the nation would be that there would be no future Indian wars and extend the reach of national commerce. Meanwhile, Secretary of War Calhoun who also backed the President’s position on removal, cited Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as key places to begin the process. Calhoun reported that surrounding white populations were a detriment to Native Americans. He thought it would be too expensive to extinguish Native title to land through negotiated purchases in Ohio as they had made improvements on their lands, which drove up land values. Calhoun recommended a gradual removal in Ohio as the best course of action.170

Part of the rationale of removal rhetoric was recreating Native Americans in the present as archetypes of a fictional past. Removal and civilization rhetoric constantly denied and ignored the changes and adaptations made by Native Americans and instead reconstructed them as pre- modern in order to maintain a sense of benevolence and buttress preferential claims to Native

169 Edwin Williams, Stateman’s Manual: The Addresses and Messages of the Presidents of the United States, Inaugural, Annual, and Special, from 1789 to 1849 (New York: Edward Walker, 1849), 465-478. 170 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 541-543.

85 lands. By 1825, this reconstruction of Native Americans as relics from the past had fused with discussions on the potential merits of mass removal in the interests of the United States.

John Quincy Adams succeeded Monroe in becoming the nation’s sixth President. He, along with his Vice-President John Calhoun, continued to push for removal as a viable method for American expansion and Native dispossession. Adams’ Secretary of War James Barbour thought that it was time for the nation to express its benevolent character as different from that of

Europeans in relations to Indians. Barbour argued that removal was impractical if it depended solely on treaties. He thought that treaties were insufficient and not wholly effective for expropriating Native lands. Instead, Barbour advocated for individual removals, which necessitated Native consent, as opposed to entire Native nations. He also opined that of Indians’ progress, in part, lead to their resistance to land cessions. He argued in favor of the abolishment of tribal identity “and their amalgamation into one mass, and a distribution of property among the individuals.”171 In Barbour’s estimation, Native Americans had to assimilate and that the ultimate goal was their uplift. Barbour thought that dividing up Native lands for individual ownership and Native schools could end the quest for land cessions and dispossession.

On a federal level, removal had taken hold as a grand solution to the problem of Native residence in the United States by the late 1820s, provoked mostly due to the Cherokee’s progress and use of civilization rhetoric to expand their own claims to residence and sovereignty in

Georgia. However, the issues were perhaps more complicated in the Old Northwest. Removal prior to the 1820s, one of many options, was not seriously considered as states and Indian agents in the region had many successes with Native dispossession and land cessions through treaties

171 American State Papers: Indian Affairs Vol, II (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 647-650.

86 that repetitively assigned Native nations reserves and then broke up those reserves to be held in singular allotments and patent in fee simple. While Native Americans in the Old Northwest remained determined to remain in Ohio and Indiana, they also were not wholly opposed to negotiating for land cessions and for annual annuities and other payments. The ability of Native bands to negotiate and adapt to post War of 1812 life in the region delayed the ability for removal to be an immediate realistic goal.

In November 1825, Indiana governor James Brown Ray wrote to President John Quincy

Adams about Native Americans and their land possessions in the state of Indiana. Governor Ray stated that the continued residence of Indians and their possession of lands in northern Indiana was “neither advantagious [sic] to the government of the United States, or to the people of

Indiana.”172 Ray volunteered himself to help negotiate a purchase of those lands in his state. Ray was confident that Native peoples in northern Indiana would accept an exchange of lands better suited to them especially given the “unparalleled tide of emigration that we have witnessed this year, daily pouring in upon us, is much of it locating near the Indian lands, which makes them uneasy.”173 Governor Ray and white citizens had wanted a canal on the Wabash River but this would run through Indian held lands. In a letter from Secretary of War James Barbour in January

1826, Governor Ray was informed that President Adams supported any treaty agreement that had the goal of removing Native peoples presently in Indiana. In May of 1826 Secretary of War

Barbour wrote to Lewis Cass, James B. Ray, and John Tipton giving them the authority “to propose an exchange of land, (together with such other conditions as you may esteem it proper to

172 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 57. 173 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 57.

87 recognize), acre for acre” west across the Mississippi River, “and to provide for the necessary supplies incident to the emigration.”174

In the fall of 1826, a treaty council gathered at Paradise Spring on the Wabash River in northern Indiana. The council opened with principle representatives from the Potawatomi,

Ottawa, Wea, and Miami nations. Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass, Indian Agent John

Tipton, and Indiana Governor James B. Ray represented American interests to garner land cessions and removal in a treaty from Native nations gathered there at the council. On October

5th Cass addressed the council by attributing the decline of Native populations and the increase in

American population to the “Great Spirit” who “sent the white men here.”175 Cass insisted that

Native peoples in northern Indiana held large swaths of land that was being underutilized by

Indians and that President Adams, in agreement, envisioned this land for white settlers. In exchange for the land, Native nations would receive large annual annuities. Cass was also clear in stating the President was “not only anxious to purchase the country of you, but he is desirous, that you should remove far from his white children.”176 Cass reasoned that removal and a separation of whites and Natives would be able to stem the tide of violent and criminal acts on both sides. Removal would also connect white settlements and allow for greater communication.

Cass argued that the safety of Native nations could only be ensured if they removed to land west of the Mississippi and settle with other Native peoples for which they would receive lands of equal size and an annual annuity. Cass even guaranteed that the President would never allow any whites to settle upon lands west of the Mississippi and that it would belong to Native nations in

174 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 124. 175 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 578. 176 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 579.

88 perpetuity. Governor Cass stated firmly to chiefs and leaders gathered in council that “You must go before long. You cannot remain here. You must remove or perish. Now is the time for you to make a good bargain for yourselves, which will make you rich and comfortable. Come forward then, like wise men, and accept the terms we offer.”177 Cass then offered missionary Isaac

McCoy as a volunteer to travel with Indians as they moved west and settle with them.

After Cass’s speech Metea, a Potawatomi chief then informed the council they would need time to consult with each other before making a decision. In the next gathering at council on October 11th Potawatomi chief Au, ba, nau, bee addressed the council and refused to sell any more lands stating “you have often asked us for land, which we have sold you. The foolish have sold you more than they ought. You now ask us for more land. The land on which we now live, we require for our subsistence.”178 Legro a Miami chief also refused the present attempts to sell

Indian lands at the council. Legro committed his support to the Potawatomi position stating that

“at the treaty at Greenville, they [Potawatomi] were the first to open their hands to you, although we advised them not. They sold then, and have continued to do so since, until experience has taught them better, and to give you the answer they now do.”179 Legro doubted the sincerity of

Cass and the other commissioners and feared the consequences of selling more land that intimated a serious lack of trust in the commissioners and the President. Instead of removal

Legro challenged the commissioners by offering an alternative path forward that mirrored tenets of older civilizationist rhetoric. Legro first asked two questions of the commissioners “Where we

177 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 580. 178 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 582. 179 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 583.

89 have ever injured you without a cause, and whether you are willing we should live?”180 Legro then declared “what you have told us before this is in part true ; you have told us to think a great deal of our land, and not to dispose of it, and that we should live by each other, like brothers, and sell and exchange our property as we choose. That is what we wish to do--we want to live like neighbours, and barter and trade with each other, if we can agree, if not, to part peacably and each keep his own.”181 Legro offered to maintain ownership of their lands and instead of removal to engage in trade and continued residence within Indiana and in community with whites.

However, outside of those conditions he flatly refused to sell Indian lands.

Governor Ray answered Legro’s question saying that the commissioners wished that

Indians should live. Ray continued that “we could take possession of your country by force and hold it, if we did not respect your rights.”182 Oddly, Governor Ray affirmed his support for native life by threatening Indians gathered in council with violence. Cass continued this line of thought by reiterating that the U.S. had beaten the Native coalitions in the War of 1812. Governor Cass also said that the President had sent them to purchase lands and that they likely would not leave without following through on some purchase of lands. Cass was firm in his belief that a deal to sell lands could be struck and relayed this belief to Native leaders telling them that the offers they would get would be too good not to accept. He advised Native leaders to think things over and come back the next day ready to engage in discussions again. The next day on October 12th

180 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 584. 181 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 584. 182 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 584.

Potawatomi chief Au, ba, nau, bee informed the commissioners that he had changed course and now “agreed to your request in part.”183

Governor Ray was initially not satisfied with the lands the Potawatomi agreed to sale and wanted them to enlarge the proposed tract of lands. Meanwhile Legro stood firm in his position that he would not sell any Miami lands. On October 16th at the council meeting Potawatomi chief

Metea outlined the terms wanted by Potawatomi in the proposed treaty as “a permanent annuity of one hundred dollars for each man in our tribe and also for each woman and child” as well as all goods currently present at the council meeting.184 Metea stated plainly that they wanted permanent annuities because their present annuities were still to be paid and “you have come to us for more land, and now before the end of this annuity comes, you will ask us for more land.”185 Metea and other Native chiefs reasoned that federal commissioners would continually ask for more land and sought to negotiate for ways that would best serve their constituencies under these circumstances. The Potawatomi signed a treaty that ceded lands previously reserved for them by the 1818 treaty of St Mary’s. The next week on October 23rd the Miami agreed to a treaty with land cessions in council that also sold lands reserved from the Treaty of St. Mary’s.

This new land cession treaty did not contain any stipulations for removal for either the

Potawatomi or Miami.

In his second annual address to the Indiana General Assembly, Governor Ray congratulated himself and Indiana for the 1826 treaty with Potawatomi and Miami bands in

183 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 587. 184 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 589-590. 185 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. I 1809-1827 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 590.

Indiana that “resulted in a cession of between two and three millions of acres of land to the

United States, lying within the limits of this state; which, will doubtless soon be surveyed and offered for sale.”186 Ray also took the opportunity to speak on the condition of the Miami in

Indiana saying that “they are wasting away, and will soon be gone, without a change in their manners and customs.”187 Ray opined that the infrastructure of canal and new roads created from this new public land would aid commerce, citizens, military defense of the nation, and attract new white settlers. While the treaty failed at its goal of removal, Ray envisioned that it would nonetheless be a significant step in provoking Potawatomi to voluntarily emigrate and leave

Indiana.

By the late 1820s, local elected officials and citizens had become convinced that Native removal was the virtuous path forward to land cessions, public land sales, expanded white settlement, and economic prosperity in the Old Northwest. On a local level states like Indiana, and those residents that they recognized as citizens, clamored for Native lands for economic profit and internal development. Their removal stance was articulated as benevolent, in the best interests for future prospects of Native American life, as well as vital to their own peace and security on the frontier.

In 1829 Governor Ray, frustrated that Native bands still lived in Indiana, proposed to either extend state laws over Indians within the state and subjecting their land to taxes or for them to sell their land and move west of the Mississippi River. In his own estimation “the absurdity of one independent power residing in another, both the happiness of the natives and the

186 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 175-176. 187 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 176-177.

92 policy and interests of the government, call emphatically for a change of relation between the parties.”188 In typical removal rhetoric, Ray asserted that residence in proximity with and interaction between whites and Indians was a detriment to both. Despite Ray’s previous work to initiate and execute Indian treaties with Native bands in his state he still seem wrangled at the mere presence Native people in Indiana. Land cessions were not enough and continued Indian residence necessitated more aggressive steps to provoke their emigration.

Renewed Calls for Northwestern Removal

In September of 1830, Indian agent John Tipton wrote to Superintendent of Indian

Affairs Thomas McKenney requesting the removal to the west of Potawatomi and Miami residents in Indiana under his charge. He submitted that the citizens of Indiana who supported this goal and that some of the Indians under his agency were both anticipating the necessary provisions to execute this collective desire for removal. Tipton noted that the Potawatomi were

“more numerous, and scattered over a larger territory in little bands” and that he anticipated an effort to “concentrate some of these people at points to suit individuals.”189 Tipton made known to McKenney his intentions to shortly resign from his post at the Indian Agency but made himself available to travel with Native leaders who wanted to scout potential destinations ahead of formal removal treaties and procedures. After the passing of the Indian Removal Act removal

188 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the Administration of James Brown Ray (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 471-473. 189 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. II 1828-1833 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 330.

93 as policy, now with its benevolence uncontested, could proceed with the altruism of American goodwill.

In a letter to Secretary of War John Eaton in April of 1831, Tipton reported that approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Native Americans still resided within Indiana of which about 1200 were Miamis and the rest Potawatomi. The Miami held one reservation of about thirty-four square miles. The Potawatomi held several smaller reserves that totaled about 900,000 acres within the state. He noted that some of these reserves were on the best land in the state, close to the proposed route of the canal and no more than twenty miles from the state capitol in

Indianapolis. Tipton stated that since the Potawatomi lived spread throughout Indiana, Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan that any treaties with them should encompass all of these numerous widespread bands. He reasoned that removal of the Potawatomi through an exchange of lands could be executed in no more than four years.

In his inaugural message to the Indiana General Assembly in December 1831, Whig

Governor Noah Noble declared that it “is important to the future growth and prosperity of

Indiana, that the remaining Indian title to lands within her borders should be speedily extinguished.”190 He argued for extinguishment of Indian land title because it was costly to the state to have spread out white settlements that required protection and the state was denied potential commerce revenue from closer settlements. Potawatomi were also suspected of joining the Indian cause during the Black Hawk war in June 1832.191

190 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough, eds. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of Noah Noble Governor of Indiana 1831-1837 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1958), 65. 191 John W. Hall, Uncommon defense: Indian allies in the Black Hawk War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 129-135.

The previous year in 1831, Sac and Fox Indians were expelled by the Illinois militia in accordance to an 1804 treaty that several Sac and Fox Indians contested as invalid. Led by Black

Hawk, in April 1832 about two thousand Native people returned to Illinois from Iowa to resume residence on their traditional lands. In response, Illinois Governor John Reynolds dispatched the state militia and instigated Blackhawk’s War. In northern Indiana fear gripped the residents of

Elkhart, Indiana as reports filtered in about fifteen white citizens who were murdered close to

Chicago and the gathering of potentially hostile Native Americans about forty miles outside of

Elkhart. White settlements in this area were isolated to the extent that Native communities lay in between them and other white settlements. Governor Noble believed that the state of Indiana was responsible for the protection and safety of those residents to ensure the continued flow of white emigrants to settle and develop the northern portion of the state. Ultimately, Black Hawk failed to compel Potawatomi and Winnebago assistance against Americans and it led to his defeat and surrender in August 1832.192

Noble concurred that it was “considered an object of paramount importance to extinguish the title of the Miamies to their lands already surrounded by our population,.”193 However, despite the positive reception Miami leaders had given to commissioners “they positively refused to go westward, or sell the remains of their lands.”194 Alternatively, negotiations with various bands of Potawatomi had been successful in securing land cessions throughout Michigan,

Indiana, and Illinois. Noble argued that forcible Native dispossession should only be an option of

192 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 235- 239. 193 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough, eds. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of Noah Noble Governor of Indiana 1831-1837 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1958), 138-139. 194 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough, eds. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of Noah Noble Governor of Indiana 1831-1837 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1958), 138-139.

95 last resort “and that ample compensation should be made to those who are divested of the territory on which they were accustomed to pursue game for their support.”195

Selective pre-emption laws in the 1820s led to a growing feeling of entitlement and expectations of further preemption laws amongst squatters throughout the West who were rapidly expanding national boundaries. In Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social

Policy, Laura Jensen argued that “From the moment Independence was declared, and particularly as the contours of America expanded, the public lands were viewed as a asset that could be utilized to accomplish a wide variety of national policy purposes.”196 The Congressional Pre- emption Act of 1830 endowed squatters with the legal right to purchase public lands that they had illegally settled upon at minimum prices.

In the midst of local calls for mass Native removals Indiana also lobbied for an extension of pre-emption rights for squatters on public lands in 1833. This would appease both whites who had already taken up residence on these lands and the state of Indiana who aimed for the quick sale of lands and settlement in the northern area of the state even before the treaty securing these lands from the Potawatomi was approved by the U.S. Senate. Indiana congressmen were called to push for an extension of two years for preemption rights following the 1832 federal law.

Indiana citizens anticipated the ratification of the recent treaty and that a preemption law extension would facilitate the rapid settlement of the northern portion of the state.197

195 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough, eds. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of Noah Noble Governor of Indiana 1831-1837 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1958), 139-141. 196 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124. 197 American State Papers: Public Lands Vol. VII, (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1860), 606.

The U.S. Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice John Marshall, reinforced the fabricated altruism of American Indian policies and Native removal. In 1831, Marshall ruled that the Cherokee were part of a domestic dependent nation that reconstructed Native people as wards of the federal government. Marshall’s legal opinion laid the intellectual, and most importantly, legal foundation to fortify a shift of Indian policies that would sanction any future calls for

Native dispossession but preserve the desired goodwill of colonizationist ideology. 198 Whereas previously, treaty commissioners like Lewis Cass or Governor Ray would settle for negotiated land reserves when Native people rebuked removal, now commissioners and citizens alike had the moral and legal cover to seek nothing less than removal and an end to collective land reserves.

In 1835, the Indiana General Assembly requested that President Jackson extinguish title to all Potawatomi and Miami land within the state. Removal of the remaining Native Americans was the goal sought after by both the legislature and citizens of Indiana. In making their claim for mass removal the General Assembly argued “That, acknowledging the paternal care and benevolent policy of the government, in securing the rights of humanity and justice to the

Indians; the interest, peace, prosperity, and happiness of the people of the State, require that they should as soon as possible be separated from us.”199 For legislators and citizens in Indiana,

Native removal was inextricably linked to their own security and future welfare “consistent with the policy, faith, and honor of the nation.”200 Both local politicians and citizens in their petitions for removal advanced the discourse of removal policy. They argued that removal was the

198 Paul Spruhan, “A legal history of blood quantum in federal Indian law to 1935” South Dakota Law Review vol. 51 no. 1 (2006), 12-13. 199 American State Papers: Public Lands Vol. VII, (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1860), 667. 200 American State Papers: Public Lands Vol. VII, (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1860), 667.

97 benevolent path forward in terms of Indian-white relations that would protect both parties and allow both parties to thrive.

Removal ascended as the primary method of dispossession in the Northwest due to the virtuousness codified by the Removal Act and because Native people, who in some regards adapted to older civilizationist ideals, balked at any further land cessions. They endeavored to become equals and property owners instead. The negotiated stipulations of previous treaties propelled and supported Native Americans’ ability to challenge removal treaties.

One of the ways in which Native nations negotiated to assert their vision through civilizationist rhetoric was through approval or denouncement of their Indian agents. Indian agents were responsible for settling claims and overseeing disbursement of Indian annuities.

They also were critical actors as treaty commissioners, or providing information to treaty commissioners in the process of dispossession. Indian disapproval of their respective agents could result in refusal to negotiate new treaties or erosion of trust that undermined Native confidence in the treaty negotiations.201 In negotiations for the Tippecanoe treaty of 1832,

Potawatomi headmen addressed “some malicious individuals [that] had circulated reports derogatory to the public standing” of their trusted agent General William Marshall.202

Potawatomi spoke highly of Marshall as “an impartial and faithful public officer” who “is kind

201 John Tipton earned a bad reputation among the Miami when he became the beneficiary of Miami chief Le Gros land reserves from the 1826 treaty. Le Gros died two months after signing the treaty and his heirs contested Tipton’s ownership of the reserves. Rafert Stewart, The Miami Indians of Indiana : a persistent people, 1654-1994 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1996), 94. 202 Statement in behalf William Turner, 15 November 1832, Box 203, Folder Letters received Indiana, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

98 to us, and attentive to our wants and necessities.”203 Perhaps most importantly, Potawatomi chiefs, including Au bau nau bee, attested that Marshall never allowed anyone to abuse their rights without repercussions. Potawatomi approval of Marshall supported his continued employment in a prized and potentially lucrative positon, which some agents used to enrich themselves.

In 1833, Lewis Cass charged Indian agents George B. Porter and William Marshall, with negotiating a treaty with Miami Indians in Indiana for land cessions and Native removal. They reported to Secretary of War Cass that they had failed to accomplish this goal. The Miami “were resolute and decided, from the first, in rejecting the proposition to emigrate, and adhered, with unyielding pertinacity” to that position.204 Miami Indians lived in the midst of several white settlements and learned that their lands lay in the path of a canal currently under construction. As such, they were aware of the increasing value of their land and exaggerated this value to commissioners seeking to purchase it. Porter and Marshall had been limited to offer no more than fifty cents per acre and the Miami opened their negotiations at a price of five dollars per acre.

In the course of the treaty negotiations, the Miami representatives attended the council nearly two weeks after the original start date. Council negotiations finally started on October 22,

1833. After the commissioners outlined their desired terms of land cessions, prices, annuities, and removal, Chapine spoke on behalf of the Miami bluntly stating, “you always talk about

203 Statement in behalf William Turner, 15 November 1832, Box 203, Folder Letters received Indiana, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 204 Letter to Cass Treaty ground, Forks of the Wabash, 16 November, 1833 Box 203, Folder Letter received Miami, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

99 going over the Mississippi. We were not raised there,” and it would be difficult for them to leave their current home.205 Chapine acknowledged that many other bands and nations had in fact already emigrated west and that the offer of money was nice but ultimately it would be of little use to them. He spoke instead of the abundant resources available to them in Indiana. Chapine concluded his statement to treaty commissioners by saying, “There is no one willing to leave—

Don’t expect we shall vary from this—We are of this opinion, and always shall be.”206 The next day the Miami did not attend council.

So on October 24th Chapine again spoke on behalf of the Miami and informed Marshall and Porter that they would not be rushed into a decision and would take the necessary time to consider the treaty offer before giving them an answer. The following day Chief Richardville introduced Chapine and reiterated that no such emigration for the Miami would take place. As

Chapine put it directly, “the Miamies, are of one mind—You offer us a handsome sum of money, but compared with our Country, it is of no more value to us than one pin.”207 Commissioners

Marshall and Porter tried to continue negotiations and convince Miami to reconsider over the next several days. Ultimately, they gave up after the Miami no longer attended the council negotiations.

The novelty of 1830s removal policy lay in the passage of the Removal Act that indemnified squatters and settler actions to expropriate Indian lands as benevolent and

205 Journal of a negotiation at the Forks of the Wabash, October & November, 1833, Folder Letters received Miami, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 206 Journal of a negotiation at the Forks of the Wabash, October & November, 1833, Folder Letters received Miami, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 207 Journal of a negotiation at the Forks of the Wabash, October & November, 1833, Folder Letters received Miami, Transcribed Documents series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

100 productive for the nation. Removal became the preferred method of dispossession, in part, because Native people maneuvered within treaty negotiations to assert new desires and the

Removal Act provided moral cover for the violence of dispossession.

Indian policies and treaties in the Old Northwest exhibited colonizationist ideology through its primary benefit for the security and economic development of white citizens for

Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. The desired removal of Native Americans to the peripheries of the expanding nation executed a vision for a future safe and prosperous nation produced through racial homogeneity.

Potawatomi Removal

As the white American population of Indiana grew from 147,000 in 1820 to over 340,000 by 1830, Potawatomis had incorporated American styles of dress and were “wholly dependent upon the traders for the many necessities of life and purchased much the same hardware and dry goods as did white settlers.”208 Some Potawatomi built log cabins as homes, but most still opposed the civilization policy desire to transform themselves into small time farmers.209 The acceptance and rejection of select forms of American culture should not lend credence to the majority opinion from local citizens and Indian Affairs officials that Potawatomi refused to seek or adapt themselves to assimilationist goals.

208 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 226. 209 Edmunds called them more akin to horticulturalists rather than agriculturalists. R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 227.

101

In fact, Potawatomi were already adapting, just not to Anglo-American yeoman farmer modes of economic integration. Potawatomi in the Chicago area were active traders with merchants in the Northwest of French heritage. Potawatomi were inclined to see traders and not farmers as an ideal of adaptation, especially given that many traders of French heritage had themselves adapted to Potawatomi culture and married Native women or were the offspring of mixed race parentage. Mixed race persons sometimes became employees of the federal government, often working as interpreters that made them indispensable for Indian Affairs officials. At the same time, treaty commissioners would sometimes select mixed race indiaviduals as representatives to negotiate treaties on behalf of native nations regardless of whether Native people actually recognized them as such.210

By the 1830s and the wave of removal aspirations from both citizens in the Northwest and treaty commissioners, Potawatomi bands had enhanced their strategic negotiations with commissioners who sought land cessions. Potawatomi were aware of the value of their lands and commissioners’ thirst for land cessions resulted in a negotiated increase of tribal annuities and trade goods in the Tippecanoe treaty of 1832.211 The treaty also did not achieve the desired goal of removal and instead garnered land cessions that authorized small reserves for individual

Potawatomi. As a result commissioners still seeking removal had to “bargain endlessly with individual tribesmen for the small reservations,” a process that was “both costly and time- consuming.”212

Blackhawk’s War in 1832 exacerbated tensions between squatters, settlers, and Natives in northern Indiana, which culminated in Potawatomi land cessions in an 1832 treaty. While Cass

210 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 228. 211 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 242. 212 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 243.

102 charged treaty commissioners with removal goals, they were only able to negotiate for land cessions and reserves. Not satisfied with the outcome, officials appointed Indian agent Abel C.

Pepper to aid the removal for a small band of Potawatomi and to negotiate with other bands to acquire their reserves and promote their removal as well. Pepper had intermittent success in achieving this goal with so many Potawatomi bands dispersed throughout Illinois, Indiana, and

Michigan Territory.213

In April of 1836, Colonel Abel C. Pepper wrote to, by now, Senator John Tipton expressing his displeasure over a breakdown in communication about the direction of intercourse with various Potawatomi bands in northern Indiana. Pepper had been discussing with multiple bands that President Jackson would not entertain any communications on their behalf in favor of them being able to retain residence within the nation. He complained that he had been unable to negotiate a treaty with Yellow river Potawatomi because the chief stated that their Priest had a document that authorized the Potawatomi to remain in Indiana and in possession of their lands in perpetuity.

On August 26, 1838 Colonel Abel C. Pepper wrote to Indiana governor David Wallace stating “that the temper and conduct of the Indians and white men on the late Pottawatamie reserve at Yellow river, manifest hostile feelings and portends hostile action, which there is too much reason to fear will eventuate in the shedding of blood.”214 Pepper asked Governor Wallace to send a military officer to lead a one hundred person armed volunteer force to ostensibly stem

213 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 241- 248. 214 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 147.

103 the rise of hostilities and prevent the breakout of violence between the Potawatomi and white

Indiana citizens.

Wallace, in a later address, stated that as a result of Potawatomi refusal to move, “a collision of the most serious character was likely to ensue between them and the surrounding settlers.”215 This prompted Marshall County citizens to send a petition to Governor Wallace that requested an armed force be dispatched to the area to protect them. Governor Wallace even traveled to the reserve to ascertain the situation on the ground himself. When Wallace arrived at

Logansport, Indiana he granted Colonel Pepper’s request for one hundred armed volunteers and asked Senator John Tipton to lead the armed force “to preserve the peace and to arrest the growing spirit of hostility displayed by the Indians.”216

Tipton, complying with multiple requests, attended a council gathering in which he reiterated to the Potawatomi that they had no choice but to leave and move west “with the addition that if they did not remove peaceably this year, he would advise the government to take them by force next year.”217 The Native Americans gathered at the council listened but refused any notion that they might emigrate and countered that they would not relinquish their reserves.

These same reserves were also concurrently occupied by squatters “who claim pre-emption rights” and had “petitioned the governor to detail a military force with Instructions to put the

Indians off the land.”218

215 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 180-181. 216 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 180-181. 217 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. III 1834-1839 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 663. 218 Nellie A. Robertson and Dorothy Riker, eds. The John Tipton Papers Vol. III 1834-1839 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1942), 663.

104

Yellow river Potawatomis had been informed that governor David Wallace dispatched a militia to the Potawatomi lands to protect squatters exercising their preemption rights. The

Potawatomis “expressed unanimously and in the strongest terms their determination of offerring no resistance.”219 Catholic minister Benjamin Petit assured Abel C. Pepper “that no disturbance from the Indians need be apprehended, and that the settlers can take possession of their preemptions peaceably, and without the assistance of a Military force, the presence of which would only be fit to create excitement & disorder.”220

As Pepper described Tipton’s assignment “was to prevent an apprehended collision between the white settlers and the Indians, on the late Pottawattamie reserve, which was threatened by the language and conduct of both.”221 Tipton and the volunteer force arrived at the reserve on August 29th. In council with the Potawatomi band leaders, Pepper “explained to them that an attempt on their part to resort to violence against their white neighbors, would be attended with fatal consequences to themselves.”222 He insisted that the Potawatomi needed to control their young men and prevent them from becoming violent and assured the Potawatomi that he would restrain violent inclinations from white men to the best of his abilities. Senator Tipton spoke to the Potawatomi in council but Pepper remained convinced “that nothing could prevent serious difficulties between the contending parties, but the removal of the Indians from the lands claimed by white men as pre-emptioners under the late law of Congress.”223 In a manner that

219 Irving McKee, The Trail of Death Letter of Benjamin Marie Petit (Indianapolis: Indiana historical society, 1941), 87. 220 Irving McKee, The Trail of Death Letter of Benjamin Marie Petit (Indianapolis: Indiana historical society, 1941), 87. 221 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 148. 222 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 148-149. 223 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 149.

105 reiterated the ideology of colonization Pepper communicated to Governor Wallace “that the public interest, peace, and security of the citizens of Indiana, as well as the future welfare of the

Indians, seemed to call loudly” for removal.”224 As Susan Ryan has argued the ‘good intentions’ of removal proponents “were contingent on the ideal of racial homogeneity, the desirability of white expansion, and the belief that certain levels of coercion were not only acceptable but salubrious.”225

Together with his volunteer militia Senator Tipton forcefully rounded up the Yellow

River Potawatomi and held them in camp in preparation for their removal. What then ensued has come to historically be referred to as the Potawatomi Trail of Death. In eight weeks, multiple

Potawatomi bands were marched and ferried over 600 miles to their new lands in Kansas disembarking at the Osage River Indian subagency. Along the way, Potawatomi suffered from malnutrition, exhaustion, and several hundred had contracted typhoid.226 In total over forty men, women, and children died along the journey while several dozens more escaped to return to starvation in northern Indiana now that annuities were no longer being paid.

Native Removal from the Northwest was never in total. Native people survived forced deportations to maintain residence in the Northwest. In fact, treaties concentrated tracts of land into the hands of some Indian leaders under their singular ownership. Property ownership afforded some Native peoples the ability to survive removal in the 1830s and 1840s.

224 Dorothy Riker, ed. Messages and papers relating to the Administration of David Wallace Governor of Indiana 1837-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1963), 149. 225 Susan M. Ryan, The grammar of good intentions: race and the antebellum culture of benevolence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003), 40. 226 R. David Edmunds, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 267- 268.

106

The American outlook on Native Americans in the Old Northwest by 1815 was unsettled as the federal government clamored for Native lands and local settlers contended for squatters’ rights. Federal treaties in 1817 and 1818 with several Native nations including Potawatomi,

Shawnee, Wyandot, and Miami attempted to avoid armed conflict in the acquisition of Native land, mitigate future hostilities, and ensure peace for Northwestern states and territories. In the

1820s the federal rhetoric about Native American capabilities shifted that pushed removal and superseded other ideas about Native inclusion even as missionaries attested to their assertion of the progress made amongst Native Americans. Potawatomi and Miami removals in the late

1830s and early 1840s reveal that removal was a response, in part, to Native adaptations to assimilationist policies according to civilizationist discourse of early America.

In the postwar period, a policy of removal emerged that quickly superseded earlier policies. Earlier in the nineteenth century, military veterans, politicians, clergy, squatters, missionaries, traders, and settlers offered competing ideas about whether Native Americans could and should become incorporated as citizens. In the early years of the nation, removal was just one of several competing ideas white Americans proposed that would generate peace along the northwestern frontier. The related goals of internal development, securing the frontier, and acquiring Native lands, evolved from a process of aggressive dispossession centered around land cessions and reserves, into one focused and executed almost exclusively through mass Native removals as the grand solution.

Mass Native American removal had both local and federal imperatives. In the Old

Northwest, Native land cessions that originated in federal treaties had muddy governance as federally appointed commissioners, sub agents, local governors, and judges negotiated, bluffed,

107 intimidated, compromised, and conceded in treaties that transferred millions of acres of land into

American hands.

Part of removal policy intended to reshape Northwest spaces and its demography since this was Indian Territory. Removal involved equal parts dispossession and replacement as the policy endeavored to usurp Indian lands but also to replace Indians with settlers that would forge these spaces as racially homogenous and fit for republican institutions. Again, land accrual was critical to state development in the Northwest and the ability of squatters and settlers to spread onto former Indian lands. Removal was also necessary to physically change the demographics of this region to make it a recognizable and authentic American space that would rematerialize in national politics.

Removal’s purported benevolence expressed colonizationists ideology in that racial separation was deemed a positive good for white citizens and Native people alike. However, it was preferentially good for Americans, as it would free up land to be purchased by squatters and settlers that would swell public coffers and allow for continued American expansion and safety on the frontier.

108

CHAPTER 4 COLONIZATION AUXILIARIES AND ANTICOLONIZATION ACTIVISM IN THE OLD NORTHWEST

In November 1837, a concerned citizen from Rock Spring, Illinois, close to the

Mississippi River in the western part of the state, wrote to the New York Colonization Society requesting copies of its annual report from the previous year. The letter’s author claimed that he requested copies of the New York auxiliary’s annual reports to reinvigorate the colonization society in Illinois because it had discontinued operations three earlier. He intended to use the reports, once received, as a guideline to rekindle the state society in Illinois. He also forwarded information to the New York auxiliary about a recent local meeting “which was first started as a compromising principle, to calm the popular fury which had been excited against the unfortunate

Mr. Lovejoy, and enlist the pious, liberal, and philanthropic in efforts to do good to the colored man and liberate the slave in a way consistent with the peace of the community and the safety of all concerned.”227 He explicitly articulated the capability for himself and fellow citizens of

Illinois, in having conversations on slavery without resorting to violence, but also that he believed colonization was a legitimate solution for people in the Northwest.

The letter’s author elaborated further that citizens who lived in free states underestimated the difficulties of eliminating slavery citing his own personal experiences of living in slave societies and being familiar with the perspectives of both slaveholders and the enslaved. In solicitation of the New York auxiliary, he opined that “colonization at least affords access to the consciences and good feelings of the slaveholders. I know this by experience.”228 As the writer

227 “Letter from Illinois,” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol.13, 12, (Dec 1837), 378. 228 “Letter from Illinois,” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol.13, 12, (Dec 1837), 378.

109 explained further about previous times he had spent in Missouri and Kentucky, “a slaveholder must feel you to be his friend, or he will not listen to emancipation.”229 Citing this friendship and concern for slaveholders as vital to the colonization cause, he expounded that “the modern antislavery process produces the contrary effect.”230 He proposed colonization as an anti-slavery solution that could appease and win support of slaveholders, while endeavoring for an indeterminate future in which slavery would be eliminated in total. He alluded to the position that the murder of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in nearby Alton, Illinois the preceding week, could possibly have been avoided if a respectable and accommodating anti-slavery solution like the colonization society had been active in Illinois.231 He sought to revive the state society and to avoid further localized mob violence prompted by disputes over slavery. Colonization supporters in Illinois, much like their peers in Ohio and Indiana, believed in colonization’s ability to calm a growing sectional divide throughout the nation and increasingly hostile and violent tensions between proslavery and abolitionists citizens in the North.

African Colonization represented an antislavery middle ground in the Old Northwest in which its proponents presented the benevolence of emigration and racial separation as the only possibility to uplift supposedly degraded free blacks. I argue that African colonization, as an expression of colonizationist ideology, functioned as a nineteenth-century nation-building tool in which racialized altruism masked its own self-interest in a white republic and absolved white

229 “Letter from Illinois,” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol.13, 12, (Dec 1837), 378. 230 “Letter from Illinois,” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol.13, 12, (Dec 1837), 378. 231 Editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered defending his press, which printed antislavery literature, by an anti- abolition mob in Alton, IL in early November 1837. It was an early flashpoint for American abolitionists that marked the increasing violence and threats to black and white antislavery activists. His younger brother, Owen Lovejoy, went on to become an abolitionist and prominent Republican in Illinois.

110 prejudice as intractable. Black anticolonization activism exposed the fictions of colonization that provided cover for colonizationists’ desire of a safe racially homogenous nation.

In antebellum America, the ACS varied by region. Even within the free states of the

Northwest, different state and local chapters held slight variances on their positions on slavery and the emigration of free blacks. Generally, ACS auxiliaries in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois can best be characterized as antislavery. Northwestern auxiliaries to the ACS sought to contain slavery and stop its spread into new territories in the West. These auxiliaries also supported prohibitions on free blacks, both free born and emancipated, to deter them from moving into free states of the Northwest. In that regard, the ACS in the Northwest was both anti-slavery and anti- black.232 Northwestern colonizationists never sought to interfere with slavery in the South, but they did repudiate slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. County and state colonization societies sought to exempt themselves from entanglements over the institution of slavery and its governance. This marked the ACS in the Northwest as antislavery, more specifically it paralleled political antislavery that focused primarily on slavery’s containment in antebellum America.233

In practice, slavery was never contained solely in the South. Even though the Northwest

Ordinance prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River and none of the subsequent states carved out of the Northwest Territory legalized slavery, unfree persons and unfree labor was common place in the lower Northwest. Slaveholders in the Northwest Territories were entitled to retain their enslaved property and grandfathered into ownership after statehood. Illinois citizens were

232 Tomek and Hetrick argued that colonization was definitively an antislavery movement that also reinforced racism. Beverly Tomek, & Matthew J. Hetrick, eds., New Directions In the Study of African American Recolonization, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 22. 233 Tomek situates colonization as a form of political antislavery that distinguished it from abolitionism. Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 12.

111 particularly creative and transformed their enslaved property into indentured servants who contracted out their labor in some cases for as long as forty years or for life. Indentured contracts were also transferable and often subject to resale by owners.234 The variety of unfree labor that persisted in the Northwest was critical context for colonizationists’ efforts to eradicate slavery and expel persons of African descent whether they were free, enslaved, or in between.

Regional auxiliaries to the ACS in the Northwest placed the focus of their rhetoric on slavery and abolition, but focused their actions exclusively on free blacks. The auxiliaries were antislavery but nonetheless identified free blacks as the central problem, not the enslaved, and endeavored to make the Northwest a racially homogenous region. In part, this chapter offers an analysis that repositions colonizationists by understanding them as free blacks characterized them and in the context of antislavery politics and nation building.235 Colonizationists in Ohio,

Indiana, and Illinois espoused the politics of antislavery, in that they were adamantly opposed to the spread of slavery. They envisioned themselves and their colonizationist activism as working toward a plausible, but not too distant, future in which the nation as a whole was rid not only of slavery but persons of African descent, both free and enslaved. For them, colonization was

234 Heerman chronicled slavery and unfree labor in early Illinois in which bound persons used the legal process of turning enslaved persons into contract servants to contest for their own freedom. M. Scott Heerman, “In a State of Slavery: Black Servitude in Illinois, 1800–1830,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 14, No. 1, (Winter 2016), 114 235 Recent scholarship positions colonization as antislavery that opposed slavery’s extension and the immoral stain it left on the nation. However, scholars also tend to lament the antiblack racism forwarded by colonizationists or interpret it as an unfortunate byproduct of colonizationism and the problems of universal freedom. See, Beverly C. Tomek & Matthew J. Hetrick eds., New directions in the study of African American recolonization (Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2017), 22. Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4. Matthew Spooner, “‘I Know This Scheme is from God:’ Toward a Reconsideration of the Origins of the American Colonization Society,” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 35, No. 4, (2014), 560. In contrast, colonizationist antiblack racism was critical to its discourse on the benevolence of removal to Liberia. It was not an unintended consequence, but rather the critical tool that gave coherence to project of colonization and enabled it to seamlessly dovetail with political antislavery that retained similar pessimistic ideals about the possibility or merits of racial equality within US borders.

112 definitively the work of antislavery. However, colonizationists also drew a strict boundary that defined their work as anti-abolitionist. For them, colonizationism was a form of antislavery politics that occupied the middle ground between proslavery advocates and abolitionists.

Colonizationists desired neither slavery nor free blacks in a politically or socially equal society.

Colonizationists forthrightly acknowledged slaveholders’ rights to their human property and their own responsibility and obligations in respecting fugitive slave laws as citizens in the Northwest.

Colonizationist antislavery represented an olive branch, a potential compromise between two increasingly divergent and possibly volatile sections of the nation in terms of slavery and free labor. Colonizationists’ discourse stated as much in their back and forth rhetorical battles with abolitionists.

This chapter recovers colonizationists’ rhetoric in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and their nearly exclusive focus on removing the local free black population. Free blacks responded by contesting and ridiculing the colonizationist scheme as a plan to strengthen slavery. They argued that the supposed degradation that colonizationists claimed inhibited their ability to become equal in America, was in fact due to black legal disability and not an inherent embodied degradation or residual effects of being previously enslaved.

Auxiliaries to the ACS in the Old Northwest failed in their goal of the wholesale deportation of free blacks precisely because of black anticolonization activism. Black anticolonization derided the colonization scheme and centralized emancipation and the elimination of black legal disability as critical in combating colonizationists’ efforts in the Old

Northwest. Black anticolonization activism exposed the fictions of degradation that invigorated the project of African colonization and attacked these fictions, namely racialized legal disability, as essential in its struggle against colonization. Examining the struggle against colonization that

113 centers free black claims provides an alternate view to the goals of colonization and its influence beyond the project of free black removal itself.

As stated previously in chapter one, the ideology of colonization prioritized the benefits rendered to the nation, and secondarily to removed persons, by transporting free blacks to

Liberia. A considerable portion of the scholarship on the ACS and its auxiliaries has focused on its goals of transporting black emigrants to Liberia, its politics on slavery, its relative failures, support from President Lincoln, and following free persons and families along their routes of mobility across the Atlantic.236 That specific focus, while important, can obscure the crux of colonization in that it sought to expunge free blacks from states in the Northwest, and throughout the nation, in the interests of creating safe, racially homogenous communities and states. Instead, this chapter seeks a focus on the goal and meaning of colonization for ACS auxiliaries in the

Northwest and the free black response to their work. If colonizationists were able to achieve their goals then what did they perceive for the future of their states? What did they envision would come after the expulsion of free blacks from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois?

The citizens and inhabitants who supported and operated colonization societies represent an important vantage point to gauge the legacy and influence of colonization in antebellum

America. In the Old Northwest, agents of colonization societies promoted the scheme to attract public support by outwardly declaring that localized Black Laws made it impossible for free

236 See, Douglas R. Egerton, “Averting a Crisis: The Proslavery Critique of the American Colonization Society” Civil War History Volume 43, Number 2, (June 1997). Hugh Davis, "Northern colonizationists and free blacks, 1823- 1837: A case study of Leonard Bacon." Journal of the Early Republic vol. 17, no. 4 (1997). Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the movement for black resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). Claude Clegg, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

114 blacks to be prosperous independent people. They determined that free blacks would never become equals because of racialized legal disability and therefore free blacks’ best hopes lay in colonization. Colonizationists declared that white citizens, and other residents of the Northwest who were genuinely concerned with the plight of free blacks and the enslaved, could best contribute to the future welfare of these people by supporting the colonization cause.

Colonizationists used the Black Laws as vindication for the goals of transporting free blacks to

Liberia.237

Colonizationism in the Northwest deftly weaved white prejudice that promoted the interests of a white republic with ostensible benevolence as a policy for black uplift. This is readily apparent through free blacks’ discourse about colonization. They attested to the connections and synergy between slavery, colonization, and legal disability that were all parts of their anticolonization work.

The ACS was one of the preeminent civil society organizations in early America.

Colonizationists often drew their support as a civil society institution from Christian charity through collections raised at church congregations, as well as benevolent reform efforts of individuals, as was popular of early nineteenth century. Colonization was not simply just a civil society institution where private citizens sought to use moral arguments to persuade their fellow

Americans in the Northwest. Its membership facilitated support in terms of fiscal donations and time from all rungs of American society as prominent members leveraged their positions as judges, congressmen, public fiscal officers, and governors to promote, lobby, enact, and protect legislation that funded and expanded the colonization cause. This mirrored one of the ACS’s

237 For an excellent source on nineteenth century Black Laws see, Stephen Middleton, The Black laws: race and the legal process in early Ohio (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005).

115 national strategies to recruit prominent Americans in an effort to leverage their influence as a means to secure federal funding for colonization.238 The ACS never received sustained federal funding but this strategy was more successful on a local level as regional auxiliaries like the

Indiana state society allocated public funds for colonization well into the 1850s.239

Institutional profile

Even before the formal organization of statewide ACS auxiliaries, colonization threatened the residence of free blacks in the Northwest. In 1824, the Ohio legislature adopted a resolution that called for both gradual emancipation and colonization as a solution to American slavery.240 Colonizationists employed a variety of methods to deport free blacks in a manner that could unify disparate political factions concerning the institution of slavery and its influences.

The Ohio state Colonization Society held its first annual meeting in December 1827. At the meeting, the Board of Managers expressed surprise at the hostility towards colonization expressed by local free blacks, despite the advantages of emigrating as they noted. To remedy that issue, they proposed to find and recruit a local free black person to speak on behalf of colonization to the wider free black community as someone that free blacks could trust. This person would travel to Liberia on behalf of the Ohio state auxiliary, then return to advocate for colonization amongst other free blacks; as yet such a person had not been found by the Board of

Managers. However, in hopeful anticipation, the Board of Managers reserved half of all monies

238 Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 26-30. 239 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 219. 240 Annual reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States, Vol. 8 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 41.

116 raised in order to have immediate funds available to transport any black Ohio residents who volunteered to emigrate to Liberia. The other half of funds raised was sent to Washington, D.C. to the national body. They also considered the possibility of new future legislation that discriminated against free blacks in Ohio that would likewise make the funds necessary to have on hand.241

In Indiana, the statewide colonization society was founded about 1828. Although, like other Northwest states, Indiana had local county auxiliaries that predated the overarching state society. However, the Indiana state society was in operation less than ten years before it ceased holding annual meetings. ACS auxiliaries and their proliferation throughout Ohio, Indiana, and

Illinois typified ways that local citizens participated in civil society reform organizations and attempted to execute their visions of state development. Colonization auxiliaries spread throughout the free Northwest signified, pointedly, that black freedom represented a larger danger to these locales than black slavery and fugitive runaways.242

The existence of slavery, as a locally governed and federally protected institution, marked persons of African descent as debased and unfit for citizenship as a safeguard against fugitive runaways.243 Slavery made black freedom a charade as it restricted the ability of free blacks to become enduring parts of the body politic in both slave and free states.244 Colonizationists often

241 First annual report of the Ohio State Society for colonizing the free people of colour of the United States (Columbus: Office on the Ohio Monitor, 1828), 4. 242 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 54-58. Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against wind and tide: the African American struggle against the colonization movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 100-111. 243 Leon F. Litwack, North of slavery : the Negro in the free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1961), 37. 244 Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004), 170-171.

117 said as much as proof for the benevolence of the colonization plan.245 As early as 1827, a report from an Ohio legislative committee on colonization had argued that free blacks were a threat to the peace and security of Northwestern states and resolved that the governor, Jeffersonian-

Republican Allen Trimble, be empowered to commit public funds to sponsor the emigration of free blacks already residing in Ohio. The report also requested that the legislature produce a bill to enact legal disabilities to deter further migration of free blacks from slave states into Ohio.246

Legislative assemblies took on the task of advocating for colonization in protection of their home states. In 1828, the Ohio General Assembly advised its congressional representatives to lobby, on behalf of the American Colonization Society, for a dedication of funds for the society’s Liberian colony.247 Ohio congressional representatives were elected by district, which allowed for more variation amongst Ohio congressmen, as well as measured accountability to their constituents. In 1829, the Indiana General Assembly also requested that its congressmen lobby the federal government for public funds to support the ACS.248

Local ACS auxiliaries provided citizens with an avenue to weigh in on controversies over slavery and attempt to chart a new local future in regards to slavery and persons of African descent. At the beginning of its formation in 1826, the Cincinnati Colonization Society counted approximately 120 members. In 1831, its Board of Managers solicited donations for agent, lawyer, and Cincinnati citizen Robert S. Finley to conduct a transportation voyage to an

245 Speaking at a meeting of the Indiana Colonization Society, national ACS spokesman Ralph Gurley commented, “Here, in our own country, the colored man is every where oppressed; he labors under social as well as civil disabilities, originating in differences of color and of race, which can never be wholly eradicated or removed.” Indiana Colonization Society report, (1846), 23. 246 “Colonization” The Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, Ohio) Thursday, December 20, 1827. 247 “Resolutions of the Ohio Legislature” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 3, 11, (Jan. 1828), 351. 248 U.S. Congress, House, Joint Resolution of the Legislature of the State of Indiana in favor of Colonizing the Free People of Color 20th Cong., 2d sess., 1829.

118 embarkation point in New Orleans to carry local free blacks from Ohio to Liberia. This proposal came in the aftermath of an 1829 riot in which a violent white mob descended onto the free black community in Cincinnati that resulted in the exodus of roughly half of the free black Cincinnati population, many of whom fled to Canada West, present day Ontario, Canada.249 At an 1833 meeting presided over by Ohio Supreme Court Justice Jacob Burnet, the Cincinnati society sought the extinguishment of slavery and endeavored to “remove from our national flag the only stain which soils it.”250 Burnet looked forward to the day when slave states in the South would recognize that slavery was dangerous and that free labor was a more profitable and prudent replacement for slavery.

In forwarding the dangers of slavery, Cincinnati colonizationists referred to the

“unfortunate revolution in Virginia, produced by the fanatic Nat Turner,” that “brought out the expression of the members of her legislature upon the evils of slavery.”251 In commenting on the progress, policy, and compromises on a federal level for slavery, progress report committee members submitted that those were good temporary fixes “but the body politic will never be healthy, until the cause of the disease is removed.”252 That cause specifically, was free blacks in

Ohio and their potential to incite enslaved persons to flee to Ohio or for insurrection.

The Indiana Colonization Society held its 1835 annual meeting at the Capitol in

Indianapolis in December. State Supreme Court Justice Isaac Blackford chaired the meeting as

249 Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of freedom : Cincinnati's Black community, 1802-1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 63-67. 250 Proceedings of the Cincinnati Colonization Society, at the Annual Meeting January 14, 1833 (Cincinnati: F. S. Benton, 1833), 15. 251 Proceedings of the Cincinnati Colonization Society, at the Annual Meeting January 14, 1833 (Cincinnati: F. S. Benton, 1833), 16. 252 Proceedings of the Cincinnati Colonization Society, at the Annual Meeting January 14, 1833 (Cincinnati: F. S. Benton, 1833), 17.

119 the Society’s President. At the meeting, Indiana Senators, Adams-Republican William Hendricks and Jacksonian-Democrat John Tipton were appointed as delegates to represent the Indiana

Colonization Society at the national meeting to be held in Washington, D.C. The Indiana auxiliary had raised enough funds at the meeting to finance the transportation of six free black

Indiana residents to Africa. At the meeting Nathan B. Palmer, a bank agent for the state, proposed that the Board of Managers send a circular throughout the state that requested donations be taken up for the Colonization Society from gatherings and celebrations by Indiana citizens on July 4th of the next year, which was later adopted as a resolution.

During society elections, Isaac Blackford was re-elected as President, Whig Lt Governor

David Wallace was elected as one three Vice Presidents, Isaac Coe was elected as Treasurer,

James M. Ray was elected as Secretary, and Samuel Merrill, Calvin Fletcher, and Nathan B.

Palmer were elected as members of the seven person Board of Managers. Rev. Elihu Baldwin, who was elected to sit on the Board of Managers, spoke about “the peculiar condition of the free coloured man in the U. States” and contested the premise that free blacks should remain in the country. Baldwin also refuted the notion that colonization would be particularly beneficial to slaveholders. Instead, he argued that “not only is this an enterprise which has promise of success; but it is the only one, which seems likely to unite the sober friends of the African race….who are desirous of attempting as much on their behalf, as will consist with the safety and the quiet of this great community.”253 He continued, “the project of colonizing the people of colour, has hitherto had the confidence and the liberal patronage of many a slaveholder. In this is their reason to hope, that both the north and the south, the east and the west, may ultimately unite.”254

253 “Auxiliary Societies” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 12, 4, (Apr. 1836), 121. 254 “Auxiliary Societies” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 12, 4, (Apr. 1836), 121.

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Colonizationists repeatedly pronounced that colonization could be a potential middle ground, stem the tide of sectional animosities, and unite the nation in an acceptable solution to rising disputes over slavery.

After a lull in its organization, the Indiana Colonization Society became reinvigorated in the 1840s. It held annual meetings and lobbied state and federal government into the mid-1860s.

In the 1840s, it continued to be presided over by Indiana Supreme Court justice Isaac Blackford and its primary spokesman was agent of the ACS Reverend Benjamin Kavanaugh. They sought to develop more local county societies and a reorganization of the state society. Kavanaugh traversed the state on speaking tours to generate public interest and raise funds for the society, often times requesting to speak to church congregations that sought to link colonization goals with both national reverence and Christian charity.255 Colonizationists envisioned their scheme as plausible both in relocating free blacks as well as in uniting Christian charity, antislavery sympathizers, anti-abolitionists, and rational abolitionists while garnering respect from proslavery supporters.

Superficially, colonizationists in the Old Northwest endeavored to entrench the racial homogeneity of their region by deporting local free black families to Liberia. To that end, local auxiliaries focused their efforts on fundraising and coaxing local free black inhabitants to abandon their residences and hopes in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and to volunteer to emigrate to

Liberia. White citizens within these states shared a common belief that free blacks were not only unseemly persons, but also an internal evil related to, but not wholly encompassed by the institution of slavery. They acknowledged the popular notion that in the future it might possible

255 “African Colonization” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 5, No. 21 (Indianapolis, IN) November 13, 1845.

121 for free blacks to become equals to whites, but balked at any idea of a biracial society.

Colonization was the only plan that could service both removed persons and the developing states of the Northwest.

Untenable nature of black residence

Indiana’s General Assembly garnered support for colonization from Indiana governor

James B. Ray as he spoke on African colonization in his annual message to the state legislature in 1829. Governor Ray, unaffiliated with any major political party, championed emancipation for all enslaved persons. He stated that he and other colonizationists anticipated the time when free blacks that had been transported to Liberia, could construct an independent nation that would be received as equals on the world stage. Ray lobbied for colonization and emancipation that coincided with the colonization cause as antislavery. Colonizationists in the Northwest articulated themselves as antislavery persons who also held a specific antipathy for black residence in the Northwest. In his address Ray contended that if “the talent of the country were fairly enlisted to convince the people of the slave states, of what their own experience will ultimately show, that free labor is more profitable than slave labor” in the hopes that slaveholders would abandon slavery of their own volition.256

Commenting on the free black population in Indiana, Ray remarked, “that the scourge of the oppressed is not confined, as it should be, exclusively to the land of the oppressor.”257 This

256 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the administration of James Brown Ray, Governor of Indiana, 1825-1831 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 470. 257 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the administration of James Brown Ray, Governor of Indiana, 1825-1831 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 470.

122 referenced the influx of free blacks into Indiana and other states in the Northwest. Free blacks in

Indiana represented a minute portion of the state population. In 1820, the state’s black population totaled less than fifteen hundred people. By 1830, the black population of Indiana had grown to about 3,600 people but that number represented less than two percent of the state’s total population. Even in Ohio as the free black total increased to almost ten thousand persons by

1830, and Illinois where the black population totaled approximately 2,300 people, both demographics barely eclipsed one percent of the total number of persons within each state.

Still, the black population represented enough of a significant threat to Indiana that

Governor Ray went on to state that the sin of slavery had produced “a non-productive and in many instances, a super-annuated population” that was “pouring in upon us possessing all the affirmative bad qualities of the uneducated, immoralised bondman, without affording any of his advantages, living without visible means, or labor—most of whom are paupers on society.”258

Governor Ray declared that Indiana needed to protect itself from a population of emancipated persons that migrated into Indiana because southern states had enacted laws that expelled them from the South, through restrictions and threats of re-enslavement that deterred them from remaining in the South and living in freedom.259 Ray commented further that “though it might savour somewhat of injustice to interfere with any that are already here, it will still become your province as it is your right, to regulate for the future, by prompt correctives, the emigration into the State, and the continuance of known paupers, thrown upon us from any quarter.”260 Ray deemed free blacks as almost assuredly indigent persons that had no place in Indiana and

258 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the administration of James Brown Ray, Governor of Indiana, 1825-1831 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 471. 259 Henry N. Sherwood, "Early Negro Deportation Projects," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 2, no. 4 (1916), 492-497. 260 Dorothy Riker and Gayle Thornbrough eds., Messages and papers relating to the administration of James Brown Ray, Governor of Indiana, 1825-1831 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1954), 471.

123 therefore offered his support to the Indiana legislature in the creation of laws that would prohibit free blacks from moving into Indiana. Colonizationists’ argued that free blacks were incompatible to their vision of state development in the Northwest.

At its annual meeting in 1830, the Board of Managers of the Ohio Colonization society reported that it had generated $279.28 in revenue during the previous year. They urged all local auxiliaries in Ohio for renewed efforts in raising funds for the general colonization cause. The

Board of Managers also lamented the aid that had been given to free black emigrants from Ohio who had recently resettled in Canada West as it may have diverted donations that would have been given to the colonization society.261 The Ohio colonization society, like the ACS nationally, was adamant on Liberia as the sole site of colonization and would only support free black emigration so far as Liberia remained the final destination.

Ohio Congressman Elisha Whittlesey was a trained lawyer and elected initially as a

Jeffersonian Republican in 1823, and later in the 1830s as a Whig from the Western Reserve area in Northeast Ohio. Whittlesey first became interested in colonization after attending the national annual meeting in 1823 and becoming enraptured by the pronouncements made by prominent members like Robert Goodloe Harper.

Whittlesey delivered a speech to the Tallmadge Colonization Society in Ohio located southeast of Cleveland in 1833. Whittlesey gave this address on July 4th, something ACS spokesmen were accustomed to doing as they sought to explicitly connect the anniversary of

American Independence with colonization to further promote it as a project of great national

261 “Ohio State Colonization Society” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 6, 3, (May. 1830), 84. This is also after the infamous 1829 riot richly detailed in Talyor’s book. Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of freedom: Cincinnati's Black community, 1802-1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 50-79.

124 importance. In this address, Whittlesey spent a brief amount of time covering census statistics for the number of enslaved Africans in early America, which totaled a little over two million by

1830. He touted the ACS as one of the most important civil society organizations of his time. In reference to criticisms of the colonization scheme, coming from both citizens in the South and the North, he submitted that colonization was generally a plan to benefit America, free blacks, and the continent of Africa. Referring to the wide appeal of colonization, he recounted that,

“Fourteen states have passed resolutions approving the plan of colonization, and almost every ecclesiastical body in the United. States, has recommended the society to the patronage of the

Christian community.”262 Whittlesey refuted any idea that colonization endeavored to perpetuate slavery.

In fact, Whittlesey declared, “Not only will Africa be civilized, and the slave trade abolished, but this country will be freed of a caste of our population by the operation of the society, and in a manner entirely acceptable to the slave holders, and without producing any commotion; and without violating any feature of the constitution.”263 He spoke of the fiscal support committed to colonization in Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky by offering “that the time is not far distant when the blacks will be removed from these states, and their places supplied by a more useful, industrious and intelligent population.”264 He went further to state that

If the states would undertake the colonization of their own blacks, the general society would be relieved from a part of the responsibility that rests upon it, and funds would be more liberally contributed. If the operation of the society shall rid this country 'of the

262 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355. 263 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355. 264 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355.

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blacks, and within a period as soon as it is consistent with the interests and the welfare of both master and slave.265 He also railed against the scheme of immediate abolition arguing that it threatened colonization.

In expounding on his thoughts on the demographics of the nation and the racial makeup of its citizens, Whittlesey imagined that the United States could break apart due to slavery and insurrection, which made colonization all the more viable and necessary. In calling for the importance of colonization to those gathered at the meeting he remarked that "If the blacks were freed, and were permitted to remain in this country, their condition would be more miserable and degraded than it is now. If you have any compassion for them, I implore you, in behalf of humanity, not to add to their wretchedness.”266 Whittlesey argued against abolition because he thought it would lead to violence with the South and the dissolution of the United States.267

ACS auxiliaries in the Old Northwest were successful in sending some free blacks to

Liberia. In total, auxiliaries in Indiana transported about eighty free blacks to Liberia before the

Civil War. ACS auxiliaries were also successful in organizing on a local county, as well as statewide level to raise funds for the operations of auxiliaries, transportation for free black emigrants to coastal departure points, and then across the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, ACS auxiliaries in the Northwest had two main problems: they expended energy and resources constantly battling against the rhetoric and characterizations of colonization by abolitionists and they routinely failed at attaining the widespread support and interest from free black communities in the Northwest.

265 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355. 266 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355. 267 Two addresses, delivered before the Tallmadge colonization Society on the Fourth of July, 1833, Elisha Whittlesey Collection, 1783-1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Pam. W355.

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Like their national comrades, colonization auxiliaries in the Northwest also had to walk a fine line between abolitionist and proslavery criticism. Proponents in the Old Northwest remained decidedly antislavery in their constructions of colonization. Indiana colonization agent

Kavanaugh himself was no fan of abolitionists, and repeatedly spoke against them charging that they used epithets and denunciations against both the South and proslavery men of the North.

White abolitionists, taking their cue from black abolitionists, characterized colonizationists as disingenuous.268 They repeatedly argued that colonizationists sought not the elevation of the

African continent and African descended peoples, but rather to strengthen the institution of slavery and further marginalize and denigrate free blacks in America.

Kavanaugh used the local press to engage in an ongoing rhetorical battle with abolitionists. In an article in a local paper, Kavanaugh said that the reorganization of the Indiana state society was causing a stir amongst the abolitionists. Kavanaugh defended colonization against the criticisms of abolitionists declaring that “I have in no instance made an attack upon

Abolitionists, nor concerned myself in regard to their movements, further than was necessary to show the difference between their modes of benefitting the colored race and that advocated by

Colonizationists, and to answer some objections which have been made by them against our cause.”269 Kavanaugh refuted that interest in colonization in the North was waning and cited the increase in revenue brought in by the state society as proof. He went even further to argue that the colonization cause was executed mostly by men of the North, specifically citing New York and Massachusetts.

268 Paul Goodman, Of one blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of racial equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 36-44. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2004), 170-172. 269 “Colonization--Abolition” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 5, No. 41 (Indianapolis, IN) April 2, 1846.

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In Chicago in 1847, colonizationists debated abolitionists on the question of whether “the plans and measures of the American Colonization Society, and its auxiliaries, better calculated to remove slavery from this country and to elevate the colored race, than those of the American and

Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party?”270 In an editorial Benjamin Kavanaugh remarked that the colonization cause was well represented and performed well in the debate. He wrote about the debate to combat the negative representation he said was given by the Western

Citizen newspaper, a Chicago abolitionist publication. Kavanaugh claimed that he needed to inform other colonization friends to be on guard for this misrepresentation to spread to other abolitionist publications and solicited a colonization supporter who attended the debate to provide a more accurate account of the debate.

These debates extracted considerable time and energy for colonizationists as they fought with abolitionists to try to win support amongst the white citizens of the Northwest. Winning individual white support was critical for colonizationists because throughout its history both nationally and on a local level, as colonizationists were never able to secure consistent, dependable government funding to execute the recruitment and transportation of free blacks to

Liberia. Unreliable funding placed a premium on the necessity of private funds raised through subscriptions to colonizationist publications, donations at meetings organized by agents of the

ACS and local auxiliaries, and expositions at churches on the colonization cause. The colonization cause depended customarily on the charity and philanthropy of white American citizens.271 Winning the fight against abolitionists’ rhetoric and their charges made about the colonization scheme was critical to securing a positive opinion amongst the general white

270 “Chicago Discussion” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 23, 11, (Nov. 1847), 346. 271 Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 24.

128 citizenry and outlining a specific space separate from abolition, but firmly within antislavery discourse, to secure private donations from these individuals in the Northwest.

As a colonization advocate Ohio Democratic Governor Joseph Wright argued that “The best remedy that can be devised for the above ignorance and scepticism, among Northern men, will be a bold and decided movement on the part of the General Government, which will look directly toward the seperation of the colored race from the white race, and the erection of the colored people into an independent commonwealth.”272 Governor Wright promoted the welfare and prosperity of Liberia as central to the colonization cause.273 The evolution of colonization and support for emigration to Liberia developed into a hard stance on the complete separation of white citizens and people of African descent by the 1850s. Support for Liberia as a prosperous and independent nation was a necessary part of claims to the benevolence of colonization.

Colonizationists’ rhetorical battles with abolitionists exposed their anxieties over free blacks, and their fears of sustained abolitionist activity in the North. In response to abolitionists,

ACS supporters did not forge a new discourse of its self-proclaimed humanitarianism, but instead reiterated the intractable nature of white prejudice and black legal disability in the

Northwest that made colonization the only palatable option to aide free blacks. Their opposition to abolitionists was central in colonizationists’ articulation of themselves as antislavery proponents that opposed both slavery and immediate abolition. Auxiliaries to the ACS in the

Northwest failed to remove local free black population wholesale, primarily due to black anticolonization activism. However, they were successful in revitalizing and disseminating a discourse that marked free blacks as unbelonging and dangerous to Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.

272 “Steamships for Liberia” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 9, (Indianapolis, IN) August 22, 1850. 273 “Steamships for Liberia” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 9, (Indianapolis, IN) August 22, 1850.

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Black anticolonization activism

Black anticolonization coalesced as a form of activism that opposed colonizationism most prominently on the specific grounds that it was a scheme to strengthen slavery throughout the nation.274 Black anticolonization exposed the fictions of colonization’s benevolence that masked its goal of a white republic and also forwarded a political discourse that fused it with abolitionism, the abolishment of racialized legal disability, equal social and political rights, and flirtation with black emigration efforts. Free blacks connected these fragments of racial uplift in claiming and working towards abolition, citizenship, and inclusion.275

In a reply to the advocates of colonization, published in David Jenkins’ abolitionist paper

The Palladium of Liberty, an unnamed the author suggested that free blacks would consider colonization if they could be accompanied by all those who remained enslaved in America in traveling to Liberia. Colonization could happen if the enslaved were set to be colonized in total, along with the free population. If that cannot be the case then there would be no consideration of colonization by free blacks. Further, since that was precisely the current circumstances and colonizationists were not willing to offer up emigration for all of the enslaved and free population together, the author proclaimed that colonization was not a reputable option for free blacks.276

274 In the only monograph that focuses solely on black anticolonization activism, Power-Greene situates anticolonization work as primarily a branch of the black struggle for citizenship in antebellum America. Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against wind and tide : the African American struggle against the colonization movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 15. 275 For a narrative on legal disability and its influence on belonging in the nineteenth century see, Barbara Young Welke, Law and the borders of belonging in the long nineteenth century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 276 “Colonization” Palladium of Liberty (Columbus, Ohio) August 28, 1844.

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In November 1845, the Indiana Colonization Society proposed to select a free black person or persons to send them on an investigative trial tour to Liberia and then return to Indiana to report their findings. The auxiliary’s most immediate problem was not that it had a lack of support or trouble raising money, but rather it had nothing to do with the funds that it had obtained. Indiana colonizationists reserved a portion of its revenue used to cover organizational expenses and payment to its state agent while also sending money to the national organization in

D.C. The society retained a significant amount of capital to use to relocate free black residents from Indiana to Liberia. However, very few free blacks actually showed interest in emigrating and even less ventured to take the voyage across the Atlantic to settle on a foreign continent. The solution devised by the Indiana board of managers would be to send a free black person to

Liberia to experience its potential first hand and then that person would return to promote colonization within the black community as a black authoritative view.

At a meeting of free black residents of Indianapolis, together with representatives of the

Indiana Colonization Society, colonizationists found some interest amongst the older generation who advised the colonization agent to travel to Terre Haute, Indiana and speak with a Reverend

Willis R. Revels, who had earned a good reputation amongst the free black community in

Indiana. The unnamed agent, who most likely was Benjamin Kavanaugh, traveled to Terre

Haute. He met Reverend Revels who listened and became inclined to venture on just such a trial expedition, if he were to be chosen as a representative of the free black community. He would also need to be approved by the state auxiliary and the national organization. Revels’ only worry was that he would need to be released from his duties as a minister for the A.M.E. church and find a suitable replacement, for which he thought his brother would be a perfect fit. At a subsequent meeting of free blacks in Terre Haute, the proposed Atlantic journey was approved

131 and Revels was selected to travel to Liberia. However, as word quickly spread about the proposed trip by Revels, and its colonizationists aims, he was inundated with letters from free blacks throughout Indiana that protested this course of action. Threats of banishment from the black community and the A.M.E. church caused Revels to rethink his willingness to travel to

Liberia. Eventually, he wrote to Kavanaugh to inform him that he would not be a party to the expedition to Liberia after all.277

For Kavanaugh the experience led him to again critique abolitionism and specifically the abolitionist principle of free discussion as a deceptive fallacy. He contended that “No, this discussion must stop. You do not believe the stories you have been telling yourselves. You are afraid of the truth! You love darkness ! And why? Because your evil deeds and falsehoods would be exposed.”278 He commented further that “The colored man here will catch the noble spirit of the free citizen of Liberia, and disdain the mean and servile walks of oppression here, and plant his feet upon soil and breathe an air that is free.”279

The process of colonization was always predicated on volition on the part of free blacks who freely chose to move to Liberia. This was beneficial to the free states in the North because it sought to avoid the violence that came with the recapture of fugitive runaways, kidnapping of free people, and the protection of free people and runaways from slavecatchers. Voluntary emigration was a method of avoiding violence and maintaining that colonization was not proslavery. Regional auxiliaries also sought to employ free blacks as agents to promote colonization within the black community to combat the accusation that colonization was a white enterprise with prejudicial underpinnings that sought to strengthen slavery. Colonization

277 “Free Discussion” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 5, (Indianapolis, IN) April 30, 1846. 278 “Free Discussion” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 5, (Indianapolis, IN) April 30, 1846. 279 “Free Discussion” Indiana State Sentinel Vol. 5, (Indianapolis, IN) April 30, 1846.

132 advocates hoped that eventually free blacks would come to fund their own transportation to

Liberia. Regional auxiliaries like the Ohio state society, following the work of the Maryland auxiliary, sought to purchase their own land and create their own privately run settlements in

Liberia that they could directly operate as they saw fit and particular to their own ideologies around colonization, slavery, and benevolence towards Africa.280

Colonizationists in the ACS insisted that they would only promote and support the emigration of free blacks to Africa. They would not support destinations to the South, North,

West, Canada, or Haiti. This aligned with antebellum expansion and foreign policy goals because all these other destinations presented potential problems in free blacks’ ability to create societies and communities that could potentially become threats to slavery by supporting abolition and prompting enslaved persons to runaway. This appeased slaveholders as well as preserved future land and western expansion that would not have to deal with problems of free black communities and sovereignty.281

Amongst free blacks, colonizationists were never able to attain widespread support. At best, they were able to achieve individual and single-family support from free blacks. This was due in part, to the policing and retribution of support for colonization from the free black community in the Northwest and nationwide. Free blacks denounced the colonization scheme due to their primary goal of abolishing slavery, immediate emancipation in slaveholding states, and their fight against the black laws in the North. For free blacks, these goals were intertwined

280 Philip J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 178. 281 Here I find that colonizationists’ insistence on Liberia only, despite the noted other destination preferences by free blacks, and capitulation to slaveowners square with recent scholarship from Matt Karp on slaveholders’ hemispheric ambitions of slavery’s expansion. Matthew Karp, This vast southern empire: slaveholders at the helm of American foreign policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 7-8.

133 with each other and colonization sat at an intersection that threatened to both strengthen slavery throughout the nation and lend credibility to consolidating the black laws by removing free blacks and colonizing them in Liberia. In fact, in the evolution of black abolitionism, anticolonization became a central flashpoint in their work to topple the Slave Power and advance a radical vision of equal rights democracy in America opposed to race based legal disability, even as several prominent free blacks, privately and in black convention debates, gave credence to the idea of black emigration.282

Black anti-colonization work remained central to both abolitionist work and anti-black laws activism. Free blacks determined that both the continued presence of slavery coupled with black legal disability constructed them as degraded and legitimized their marginalization, political exclusion, and reconstructed them as aliens, as unnatural and dangerous persons in the states that they resided in the Northwest. As such, anti-colonization activism helped forge themselves as belonging to the nation and their Americanness in the eyes of white citizens.

In Colored Convention meetings free blacks determined that colonization threatened to strengthen the institution of slavery by its sole focus of deporting the free population to Liberia.

Free blacks emigrating to Liberia would remove the most consistent and radical core group of

American abolitionists. This would have a negative effect on the prospects for free black inclusion, regardless of abolitionists’ stance on emigration.

The free black response to colonizationist activism and efforts in the Old Northwest was overwhelmingly to condemn the ACS, its supporters, and to counter colonizationist rhetoric about its benevolence and the benefits of colonizing free blacks in Liberia. In a January 1842

282 Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against wind and tide : the African American struggle against the colonization movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 129-157.

134 meeting of free blacks in Indiana asserted “that we believe no well informed colonizationist is a devoted friend to the moral elevation of the people of color.”283 In asserting that colonization was in actuality, a scheme to entrench slavery free blacks challenged colonizationists who claimed that the goal was to colonize the entire black population to Africa. This would result in the abolition of slavery and as one writer put it in 1844, “let them advocate the colonizing of the slave if they think fit, and the work is done.”284

In 1848, the Free Soil movement took shape in the North. Free Soilism exhibited fusion politics as former Whigs, Liberty party men, and Democrats forged a new political party to oppose the Slave Power. At the national 1848 Colored Convention meeting, held in Cleveland,

Ohio, Frederick Douglass, Charles Langston of Ohio, John Jones of Illinois, Henry Bibb of

Michigan, and J. G. Britton of Indiana were appointed to the national central committee. The business committee resolved that no one should support any political party that did not have equal rights without regard to color as one of its primary goals. “That while we heartily engage in recommending to our people the Free Soil movement, and the support of the Buffalo

Convention, nevertheless we claim and are determined to maintain the higher standard and more liberal views which have heretofore characterized us as abolitionists.”285 As the committee held considerable reservations about the Free Soil party, they still registered their support as they determined it contended as their best, or more accurately in terms of political parties options only, hope of achieving political equality.

283 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 174. 284 “Colonization” Palladium of Liberty (Columbus, Ohio) October 16, 1844. 285 Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention (Rochester, NY: The North Star Office, 1848), 14.

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The business committee also resolved to encourage enslaved persons to escape slavery and “to use all justifiable means in aiding our enslaved brethren in escaping from the Southern

Prison House of Bondage.”286 Jefferson Fitzgerald reported on the potential for ‘home emigration’ to northern Michigan in either Oceana or Mason counties. Fitzgerald submitted the report in the hopes that the convention would promote the plan amongst free blacks. The business committee promoted the annual meeting of state conventions so that free blacks in the

North could work to promote the repeal of the Black Laws. Specifically, they cited that they were against paying representational taxes until they were able to vote and hold office. They considered the “American Colonization Society as the most deceptive and hypocritical” of any plan to designed to oppress people of African descent in America.287

In July 1849, free blacks in Fort Wayne, Indiana gathered to consider an appeal from a fellow free black man, William W. Findlay, that “urging them, if they would enjoy social, civil and political privileges, and be truly independent, to Colonize in Liberia.”288 In reply the meeting announced that “we are determined to use all lawful means” to attain the full rights of citizenship

“for our fore-fathers fought, bled and died to secure for us and to us these things, in common with other citizen soldiers, in the revolutionary War.”289 Specifically in regards to the colonization scheme, they responded, “we feel insulted when asked to emigrate to Liberia; and when a colored man becomes the tool of such a Society, or on his own responsibility advocates

Colonization, we look upon him as recreant to the best good of his race.”290 Black anticolonization, through its constituent parts, asserted their membership and belonging in

286 Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention (Rochester, NY: The North Star Office, 1848), 14. 287 Report of the Proceedings of the Colored National Convention (Rochester, NY: The North Star Office, 1848), 16. 288 “Voice from the Colored Citizens of Ft. Wayne, Indiana” Anti-Slavery Bugle (New Lisbon, OH) August 11, 1849. 289 “Voice from the Colored Citizens of Ft. Wayne, Indiana” Anti-Slavery Bugle (New Lisbon, OH) August 11, 1849. 290 “Voice from the Colored Citizens of Ft. Wayne, Indiana” Anti-Slavery Bugle (New Lisbon, OH) August 11, 1849.

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America. Further than staking a claim, they pronounced themselves as American through nativity and contributions to the nation in the face of their legal exclusion from citizenship.291

In their debates over emigration and the efforts of the American Colonization Society free blacks, in part, debated over how best to respond to white racism in a way that would be productive to the present and future constitution of black communities. Some free blacks, most famously Martin Delany in the latter half of the 1850s, argued for emigration because they felt it was senseless to believe that they would earn equal rights in America. Instead, black emigrationists believed the best thing free blacks could do for themselves and future generations was to migrate somewhere to attain independence and to have their own nation.

Free blacks in Indianapolis gathered to celebrate the anniversary of Haitian Independence in 1849. At this gathering, a speaker denounced the ability for two races to live together and advocated for black emigration but opposed African colonization. The speaker also stated that those in attendance should not view America as their home “but to look forward to a state of nationality and independence” for which he suggested California as a plausible option.292

At the Ohio Colored Convention meeting of 1849 David Jenkins, former editor of the by then defunct black newspaper Palladium of Liberty, spoke in favor of emigration and leaving the

United States in regards to a resolution on the meeting floor on that denounced support for emigration. George Williams, a delegate from Ross County Ohio, spoke in favor of emigration but also cautioned the conversation because of its implications for black residents throughout the nation. Williams “said that he did not want to look up to the white man for everything. We must

291 Kunal Parker has argued that legal exclusion and colonization combined to render free blacks as foreigners. Kunal Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4-6. 292 “Sentiments in Indiana” African Repository and Colonial Journal Vol. 25, 10, (Oct. 1849), 310.

137 have nationality. I am for going any where, so we can be an independent people.”293 Other delegates in attendance adamantly opposed colonization. John Mercer Langston spoke to those gathered at the meeting in favor of emigration. Langston stated that “I for one, sir, am willing, dearly as a l love my native land, (a land which will not protect me however,) to leave it, and go wherever I can be free.”294 Langston also thought that having nationality remained key in becoming an independent, but also respectable people. He recognized that nationalism existed an increasingly necessary currency in the world and a potentially productive path forward to being perceived as on an equal level with white citizens both domestically and globally. Langston went on to say that “the very fact of our remaining in this country, is humiliating, virtually acknowledging our inferiority to the white man.”295 The resolution was then referred to a three person committee. The committee then made a majority report from committee members John

Langston and W. Hurst Burnham, to the entire general body of the convention that supported colonization only in the “event of universal emancipation.”296 The committee stated that they were against “any scheme of colonization, in any part of the world, in or out of the United States, while a vestige of slavery lasts.”297 J. L. Watson made the committee’s minority report in favor of adopting the resolution against colonization speaking directly to colonizationists “that all of

293 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 223. 294 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 223. 295 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 223. 296 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 225. 297 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 225.

138 their appeals to us are in vain.”298 His minority report favored remaining in the United States and to fight for their rights “at all hazards.”299

The meeting ultimately adopted the resolution that opposed colonization in total. In its address to white citizens of Ohio, the convention refuted a recent memorial sent to the state legislature by David Christy, Ohio agent of the ACS. The convention refuted Christy’s claim that the increasing free black population in Ohio and the Northwest as an evil and a nuisance to white citizens that necessitated the state legislature to appropriate funds to transport free blacks to

Liberia since the state remained unlikely to repeal its Black Laws. By 1840, the free black population in Ohio had swelled to over 17,000 people. However, the massive increase of white emigration swelled the state total population to over one million persons, which meant that the total black population still amounted to about one percent of the total state population. In opposition to the claim made by Christy, the Ohio convention’s resolution submitted that “we believe you do mean to repeal the enactments against us, and also, that whether they are repealed or not, we mean in the spirit of our resolution, here to remain amid the broken columns of our temple of liberty, and cry, “Repeal, Repeal, Repeal,” until that repeal is granted.”300

By 1850, the black population of Ohio rose to 25,000, 11,000 in Indiana, and 5,000 in

Illinois. At the cusp of the Civil war in 1860, the Ohio black population totaled 36,000, 11,000 in

Indiana, and about 7,500 in Illinois. Each state’s black population still hovered around one percent of the statewide total. Overwhelmingly free blacks opposed colonization in all forms

298 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 225. 299 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 251. 300 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 234.

139 whether it be in northern, western, or southern states, Africa, or Canada. Individuals remained free to choose colonization on their own, but discouraged from using colonization to denigrate black residents who chose to stay in the nation and continue in the struggle for equal rights.301

In debates over whether emigration should be an option for free blacks, convention delegates wrangled over how best to respond to white racism and racialized legal disability in a way that would be beneficial to their own interests, currently and in the future, that also took into account the millions of African descended peoples still enslaved in the Upper South, Deep South and the West. Black anticolonization work chiefly and most consistently concerned itself with slavery and the enslaved. Most often, black anticolonizationists grounded their opposition to colonization as concern with the millions of people that would remain in bondage if the colonization plan to remove free blacks were to be successful. This supported the foundation of their position that colonization was a scheme to strengthen slavery throughout the nation.

The 1851 Indiana Colored Convention wanted to pay special attention to colonization since the “the colored people of Indiana had called a Convention for the purpose of deciding in favor of emigrating to Liberia.”302 The convention denounced the colonization scheme in its entirety saying that free blacks in Indiana would never, as a whole, emigrate to Liberia and resolved that “We believe the emigration of the free people of color of these United States to

Liberia would be the means of riveting the chains tighter, and forever upon our enslaved brethren.”303 At a meeting of the Ohio Colored Convention in 1852, the convention’s majority

301 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 318-323. 302 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 177. 303 “The Minutes of the State Convention of the People of Color of the State of Indiana,” State Convention of the People of Color of the State of Indiana (1851 : Indianapolis, IN), ColoredConventions.org, accessed November 9, 2018, http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/629.

140 report on emigration, authored by Charles Langston, Henry Ford Douglas, and Peter Humphries

Clark, declared that “we believe that the primary, secondary and ultimate object of the American

Colonization Society, is the exportation of the free colored people from the United States, and thereby render the slave property more secure and valuable.”304 The conventions minority report on emigration recommended that no free blacks emigrate from the United States so long as even one enslaved person remained in America.305

ACS auxiliaries failed to get majority black support through monetary donations, volunteers for emigration, and numerous black spokespersons to advocate for colonization. In opposition to colonization, free blacks contended that ACS auxiliaries were not even antislavery, as they consistently claimed, since free black emigration would predictably strengthen slavery in

America.

Colonization coincided political antislavery because colonizationists perceived their deportation project to be a middle ground between proslavery and abolitionist ambitions.

Colonizationists desired neither slavery’s expansion nor free blacks. For all of colonization’s antislavery, pro black potential discourse, and its matching of money and action to its rhetoric, both nationally and in the Old Northwest, it was never able to acquire and maintain majority black interest or support. To the contrary, overwhelmingly free blacks reputed and combated colonization and its supporters. They asserted that colonization itself as an impediment to struggles for black uplift and not the solution.

304 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 279. 305 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 279.

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The ideology of colonization prioritized the benefit rendered to the nation in the removal of nonwhites. African Colonization’s benevolence emerged through its claim to arrest slavery’s expansion and deliver free blacks from white prejudice in America to Liberia, a space appropriate for their race. This chapter explored the actions of ACS supporters in the Old

Northwest as they sought to put their ambitions to work and achieve their goals. African colonization rhetorically expressed a method of atonement that could remove slavery and persons of African descent as well as redeem Africa religiously, socially, and politically.

Free blacks and their abolitionist allies argued that colonization served as a scheme to rivet the chains of slavery in America. They challenged colonizationists on their antislavery stance. They contended that if colonizationists were really concerned with slavery and the plight of the enslaved they would be chiefly concerned with colonizing enslaved people and not free blacks from the North and Northwest. Colonization was, in part, a method of nation building that sought to remake the Northwest as a white republic. African Colonization was a fantasy of benevolence that not just absolved white prejudice and legal disability, but thrived off its existence to justify its claim and construction of racialized spaces of equality and freedom.

Consequently, colonization remained unsuccessful in its main goal, not because of a lack of effort or ability to raise money for the cause, but precisely because of black anticolonization activism that denied the ACS the most critical resource it required to carry out its scheme: countless black families willing to emigrate to Liberia. Colonization faltered statistically in the

Old Northwest because free blacks organized and disseminated literature, petitioned legislatures to rebuke colonization, and ridiculed free blacks who did opt for colonization. The ACS and its northwestern auxiliaries may have been successful in changing the racial demographics to their desired ends if they had not been uniquely set on Africa as the only destination that they would

142 fund for colonization. Free blacks routinely expressed moderated interest in emigrating to

Canada, Haiti, the western territories and the Southwest as possible destinations. Perhaps, if the

ACS achieved a consensus and had been willing to entertain multiple destinations it may have been more successful in terms of the sheer number of persons it transported from the Northwest to other racialized spaces.

However, colonizationists’ greatest achievement came from disseminating a discourse on free blacks that promoted colonization as benevolent and an antislavery middle ground that opposed the spread of slavery, championed free labor, and opposed abolitionist agitation. Aid for fugitive runaways in the North often resulted in mob violence and charges of not obeying the federal fugitive slave laws from border slave states like Kentucky. Colonizationists’ capitulation to slaveholders and their focus specifically on free and manumitted persons marked colonization as pointedly a dilemma of black freedom. In essence, the exclusive focus on free blacks by the

ACS and its auxiliaries marked black freedom as the primary conflict in early America, rather than black slavery, that was not limited to slave states but rather encompassing of all places where free blacks resided.

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CHAPTER 5 “FREE BUT NOT WHITE:” LEGAL DISABILITY AND INTERSECTIONS OF COLONIZATION

William Howard Day, born in 1825, was a minister, abolitionist, and graduate of Oberlin

College in Ohio. He participated in the antebellum Black convention movement often having debates on appropriate strategy, and goals in seeking to both end slavery throughout the nation and abolishing legal disabilities for free blacks in the North. In the Ohio state conventions, delegates often rebuked colonization along with legal disability and attested that as part of their collective struggle they badly needed an official organ of communication. They recognized that part of colonization’s continued appeal existed because they lacked a voice in the public discourse on the present condition and future of black people in Ohio.

After taking on the responsibility at a convention meeting a few years prior, Day followed through on this promise and produced a paper entitled The Aliened American in 1853.

In the very first issue chief editor Day, along with corresponding editors Samuel Ringgold Ward of Toronto and J. C. W. Pennington of New York, published articles on antislavery, colonization, the previous year’s Ohio state convention meeting, some fiction, advertisements, and relevant correspondence from prominent free blacks. Day cited his paper’s mission as “to visit weekly, the haunts and the homes of the sovereigns of this land, with our demand for simple justice: to aid the educational, mechanical and social development of Colored Americans.”306 The paper’s very title is significant. In the big picture, colonizationists transported less than twenty thousand free blacks to Liberia prior to the Civil War and ultimately failed at deporting the total of the free black population in America. However, colonization coupled with racialized legal disability

306 “To Our Patrons,” The Aliened American (Cleveland, Ohio) April 9, 1853.

144 succeeded at shaping the discourse and policy about who could become citizens. That is what

William Day and the corresponding editors described both in paper’s chosen title and in the body of the very first edition. In an extended editorial about the new paper’s politics and purpose

Ringgold declared,

our fellow citizens, deprived, for consecutive years, by what is miscalled Law, of almost every right dear to freemen, and because thus deprived, made helpless, comparatively— this class of native-born citizens, thus treated worse than foreigners—have had no mouthpiece to speak for them. This paper speaks for them, first through its name— Aliened American. Born under the United States’ Constitution, and entitled by it, to all the rights and immunities of other citizens, the State and National Governments have not only disfranchised, they have ostracised—have made them aliens—through their Law, their Public Opinion and their Community Regulations.307 The totality of colonization, anti-black legislation, and political parties that compromised on supporting black male suffrage, amounted to re-creating free blacks as foreign, as native-born aliens to the spaces that they resided in, which no amount of education, or occupation, or performance of respectability could quite dispel. Legal statutes reconstructed free blacks as aliens that served the interests of a white republic and the purported benevolence of colonization.

In the antebellum Northwest, legal disability and colonizationism were one and the same. Both colonizationism and legal disability had as their ultimate goal the erasure and expungement of free blacks and Native Americans from the Northwest states. Legal disability served as a benevolent catalyst for colonization that complemented forced removal in the interests of creating a white republic.308 However, racialized legal disability created a dilemma for persons of mixed race heritage. This chapter explores the connections between racialized

307 “Our Present Number,” The Aliened American (Cleveland, Ohio) April 9, 1853. 308 The title from this chapter is taken from a phrase authored by Peter Wallenstein. Peter Wallenstein, Tell the court I love my wife : race, marriage, and law--an American history (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 14.

145 legal disability and colonizationist efforts to remove free blacks and Native peoples from the Old

Northwest.309 Legal disability and colonizationist thought had a symbiotic relationship.

Racialized legal disability intended to deter the migration and residence of free blacks into the region. It also intended to marginalize Native inhabitants and encourage their emigration since the governance of Native peoples fell under federal jurisdiction and states had limited power to subject Native peoples to state laws.

Colonizationists often spoke of the supposed degraded nature of free blacks and Native peoples as a rationale for supporting their emigrations both west across Mississippi River and east across the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes, they even cited legal discrimination that adversely affected the prospects for black and Native life, as proof of black and Native inferiority to further the colonization cause. To refute their purported degradation, free blacks often cited legal disability as the sole cause of their debased state in society. In essence, legal disability was implemented to deter black and Native residence in the Old Northwest and coerce existing nonwhite residents to emigrate. Colonizationists then used the same legal discrimination to argue that Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and other free states carved out of the Northwest Territory, should not be places for nonwhites to live because they would face legally sanctioned white prejudice.

Legal disability reinforced colonizationist goals and served as evidence for its supposed benevolence.

309 Here I appropriate Welke’s definition of legal disability as the denial of capacity and the antithesis of legal personhood. Legal statutes restricted the access to rights, protections, equal access to engage in contracts, and the ability to hold elected office for people of color, women, and immigrants in the nineteenth century. Barbara Welke, Law and the borders of belonging in the long nineteenth century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7-10. Welke builds on scholarship on the legal disability of married women in nineteenth century America. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55-56.Hendrik Hartog, Man and wife in America: a history (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2-12.

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States, municipalities, and courts in the Old Northwest enacted and enforced laws that constructed and defined Natives and free blacks as damaged persons who represented internal threats to the present and future prosperity and security of these states. The multiple forms of racialized legal disability had the practical effects of delegating to white citizens police power over Native and black residents. Law constructed the genealogical limits of citizenship through a broad construction of whiteness, evidenced most clearly by mixed race people’s legal suits to be classified legally white, that rendered free blacks and Native people as native-born aliens. Forced physical removal was often untenable: either it was too costly or it was constrained by the rhetoric of benevolence. By contrast, legal disability was the on-the-ground application in state law of colonizationist ideology. Like colonization, legal disability sought to create a white republic by discouraging Indian and black residence.

In the Old Northwest free states such as Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio implemented and sporadically enforced laws that denied free black men suffrage rights, imposed limits on testimony in courts from Indians and free blacks, and restricted equal access to public schools, among a host of other legal exclusions. In opposition, abolitionists and free blacks argued that the degradation central to the American Colonization Society’s claim to benevolence and colonization extended beyond the Black Laws and discriminatory legislation against Native people.310

310 In this era, the Old Northwest promoted and facilitated Indian removal and African colonization in the efforts to make safe, secure, and prosperous states. Black and Indian colonization resolved issues of race and citizenship. The confluence of politics and civil society within colonization created an imagined place for Indians and African Americans on the physical, social, and political borders of society. Legal statues were critical for doing that work and states wielded considerable power in executing the legal side of colonizationism. For scholarship on Black Laws in the Old Northwest, see Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: the Negro in the free states, 1790-1860 (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1965), 114-150. Eugene Berwanger, The Frontier against Slavery; Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1967), 30-59.

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Legal disability emboldened colonization ideology and the benefit rendered to the nation because it aspired to deter nonwhite residence and settlement in the Northwest. By seeking to purge the Northwest of nonwhites through legalized disability, white citizens would avoid the entanglements and issues with governing slavery, even in free states, and be entitled to procure, distribute, develop, and profit off land however they saw fit, without fear of Indian violence from expansion and dispossession. Racialized legal disability and colonization schemes both endeavored to create a safe, prosperous white republic.

Legal disability remained critical to colonizationists’ goals to remove Native Americans and free blacks. Treaties, as legal documents, were primarily methods of dispossession that transferred Native land into American control. The inefficiency of dispossession through treaties accelerated the drive toward wholesale Indian removal and colonization west of the Mississippi

River. Treaties set the boundaries of Native access to American law and limited the grounds upon which they could pursue legal recourses to grievances against the federal government, state

Historian Dana Weiner argued that the Black Laws of the Old Northwest illustrated that states articulated civil rights in antebellum America. States in the Old Northwest appropriated slave codes from the South to mark free blacks in the North as excluded and ineligible for full citizenship. Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: fighting slavery and prejudice in the Old Northwest (DeKalb, Illinois : NIU Press, 2013), 36. In contrast, Stephen Middleton took a redeeming approach and contended, “that race-specific laws could not long endure in a country that made freedom and equality the birthright of its people.” He identified the free black strguggle against Ohio’s Black Laws as an early civil rights movement. While I take issue with this assessment by Middleton on the meaning and trajectory of black legal disability in Ohio, his work on Ohio remains the best focused examination of Black Laws in the Northwest. In Middleton’s own assertion, he argued that the Black Laws “had one specific objective: to make life for African Americans in Ohio so intolerable that these men and women would not use the free state as a refuge from the oppression of slavery.” Stephen Middleton, The Black laws: Race and the legal process in early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 3-4. In terms of Native Americans Deborah Rosen offered that the varied governance of antebellum Indian policy and the ability for states to assert local influence of the direction of policy requires an examination of local legal statutes and courts in their local pursuit of dictating Indian affairs. Scholar Tim Garrison argued southern state courts used traditions of anti-Indian legal prejudice to construct judicial opinion that eroded Native sovereignty and provided a legal justification for states extinguish Indian land claims and support removal. Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and state law: sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), xi-xvi. Tim Alan Garrison, The legal ideology of removal: the southern judiciary and the sovereignty of Native American nations (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 5-6.

148 governments, and individual white citizens. Indians ability to use the courts were limited to the extent of stipulations in their official treaties with the United States. Beyond that, they had to persuade local Indian agents and hope that agents, or missionaries, would extend goodwill to them and attempt to negotiate on their behalf.

Black Laws were not exclusive to the Northwest, but their proliferation in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois sought to make free blacks’ lives so debased that they would come to see emigration as a blessing, an escape from prejudice, violence, and exclusion. Free blacks held greater access to the courts than Native Americans, but had witnessed an escalation and increase in legal statues against them by midcentury. Legal disability was crucial to colonization’s seemingly benevolent appeal. Only because of racialized legal disability could colonizing foreign spaces in the west or in West Africa seem reasonable alternatives for free blacks and Native Americans.

Legal history is an important site of colonization study, as racialized legal disability aided the claims of benevolence for colonizationists. Scholars have chronicled the nuances of law and rights for nineteenth century Americans that defined the gradations of citizenship.311 Free blacks sought American citizenship as the solution to their problems of exclusion and racial discrimination. However, the law failed to recognize them as belonging within the nation.

Unbelonging for free blacks foreclosed many attempts to use the law for direct claims to

311 Rogers Smith takes seriously the historical inegalitarian nature of American citizenship that does not fit neatly within either liberal or republican strands. For this, he advanced an ascriptive tradition of American citizenship that speaks to this inegalitarian history. In this long view, the protections and privileges of American citizenship were expanded and contracted that delegated rights to deserving citizens that espoused both liberal and republican tenets. This contextualized the complexity and contradictions of America’s civic tradition. Rogers M. Smith, Civic ideals: Conflicting visions of Citizenship in U.S. history (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 3-9. Also see, Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). James Kettner, The development of American citizenship, 1608- 1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Nancy Isenberg, Sex and citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Evelyn Glenn, Unequal Freedom: how race and gender shaped American citizenship and labor (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2002). Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998).

149 citizenship.312 Native Americans were officially recognized as sovereign nations who held rights to land and self-government and negotiated with the federal government through treaties.

However, while Indian treaties laid the groundwork for land cessions and American annuity payments and protection, Indians had increasingly little power to hold Americans accountable for treaty terms. Native peoples were simultaneously inside and outside the law.313 They held land individually as a result of treaties, but did not hold suffrage rights or the ability to testify against white persons in courts. Law in the antebellum Old Northwest persistently and flexibly interpreted African Americans and Native Americans as non-citizen residents, excluded from the body politic even as they owned property, sought to sustain their communities, and free blacks

312 Law, national identity, and unbelonging are also employed in the works of Welke and Sweet. John Sweet argued that the colonial legacy of white supremacy was instructive to racialized borders of citizenship and inclusion constructed by northern states in early America. Welke argues for the gendered, abled, and racialized limits on nineteenth century personhood. Barbara Welke, Law and the borders of belonging in the long nineteenth century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). John W. Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 5. In using the descriptor unbelonging I deploy it in the same manner as offered by legal historian Barbara Welke. Welke argued that from the outset citizenship within the nation were defined and articulated in racialized and gendered modes. Welke used legal history to argue that “From the outset, personhood, citizenship, and nation were imagined in abled, racialized, and gendered terms: able white men alone were fully embodied legal persons.” They were the nation’s first and only citizens and that construction “was fundamental to the very nature and meaning of nineteenth-century American law in both conceptual and constitutive terms.” Welke provided a framework that revealed the continuity of inclusion and exclusion by law that transcends the formal practice of rights and citizenship. Welke argued further that this exclusionary foundation was evident in the antebellum and postbellum United States since “Abled, racialized, and gendered identities – simply assumed at the beginning as the foundation or justification for the granting or denial of personhood and citizenship – came to be self- consciously embraced, marked in law, and manipulated, protecting able white male privilege not simply up to the Civil War, but after it as well.” In this sense, Welke submitted an argument for legal continuity throughout the nineteenth century that adapted to changes rendered by the Civil War, but retained its stratification of personhood and citizenship. Barbara Y. Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2. 313 Rosen argues for the expansive local governance of Indian affairs in the nineteenth century in which states determined that rights and status of local Native peoples despite superseding federal jurisdiction. Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and state law: sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), xi-xvii.

150 paid taxes.314 Civil society buttressed this legal displacement through its campaigns for colonization.315

Colonizationists often cited legal disability along with white prejudice as vindication for the objective and execution of the colonization enterprise. While colonizationists often remarked that white prejudice as an intractable force driving removal, it is important to note that it was also shaped by legal disability. The economic and material interests of white citizens in the nineteenth century did not require racial animus towards nonwhites, but the law definitely nurtured white prejudice amongst white citizens as their civic duties obligated them to act as guardians of racialized legal disability in the interests of safe, prosperous communities, towns, and states.

White citizens petitioned, voted, and imposed legal disability that intentionally marginalized free blacks and Native Americans, which supported a Herrenvolk democracy, in an effort to provoke them to emigrate from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois of their own volition.316 For free blacks and Native communities their ability to protect themselves and their property, and advance their economic and social positions tenuously resided on the whim of white peers in the

314 Parker submitted that political and legal strategies have been used to construct insiders as aliens or foreigners in the United States, most often but not limited to racial boundaries. Parker argues that this is distinctly different from classes of citizenship as foreigners who were designated as aliens or noncitizens. Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600-2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4. 315 This project also employs the frame of legal borderlands to describe the ways in which law was used to supplement and replace colonizationists goal where physical expulsion of African American and Indians could not be achieved. Dudziak and Volpp argued that law defined the boundaries and limits of national identity. The concept of legal borderlands “demarcate ideological spaces or gaps, holes in the imagining of America, where America is felt to be "out of place," contexts in which, in spite of American ideals of democracy and rights, violations of the law are routinized, such as in the space of the prison.” Mary L. Dudziak and Leti Volpp, “Introduction Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders” American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3, (Sep., 2005), 596. 316 Fredrickson describes a herrenvolk society as one in which people of color are regarded as permanent outsiders. George M. Fredrickson, White supremacy : a comparative study in American and South African history (New York : Oxford University Press, 1981), xi; For other works on American herrenvolk ideology refer to Kenneth P. Vickery “‘Herrenvolk’ Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the U.S. South,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 16, No. 3, (June 1974). David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999).

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Northwest. Legal disability empowered white citizens as protectors, guardians, and overseers of society. Racialized legal disability made white citizens’ surveillance and endorsement of Natives and free blacks part of their civic duties as responsible citizens.

This chapter traces some of the early iterations of racialized legal disability in the

Northwest and their subsequent usage in colonizationists’ rhetoric on the merits of deporting

Indians and free blacks. However, legal disability also structured the response of mixed race persons in the Northwest to their exclusion. Legal disability not only encouraged colonizationist work in the Northwest, it also structured how citizens and non-citizens interpreted the meanings of race and adapted to racialized constructions to create space for themselves and their kin. Legal disability motivated mixed race persons to pursue civil litigation to gain access to rights generally reserved for white citizens and transcend their imposed legal disabilities. These admixture suits often validated existing racial constructions and further reinforced the boundaries and privileges of white racial status.

Black Laws and legal disability

Black Laws sought to make black life in the Northwest intentionally marginalized to make colonization seem benevolent in its appeal. In opposition, free blacks attacked both the

Black Laws and colonization as complementary parts of a scheme that denied them citizenship and forged the fantasy of black degradation. Black Laws existed throughout most of the antebellum United States. Ohio’s Black Laws situated free blacks in a liminal state and local colonizationists used this legal disability to their advantage to garner support for the removal of free blacks from Ohio. Racial discrimination in law preserved the fictions of degradation on free

152 blacks that colonization proponents proposed as the primary beneficiaries of their removal projects. Colonizationists staked their claim to the benevolence of their goals upon the dreadful conditions faced by the nominally free black residents of the Northwest. Free blacks and colonizationists often cited legal inequity as a primary cause of the social and political alienation for black residents of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. American Colonization Society advocates promoted black emigration to Liberia as a solution, while black anticolonizationist activists and white abolitionists frequently argued for an end to legal inequity based on race or color. The colonizationist movement in Ohio, and throughout Indiana and Illinois, had a symbiotic relationship with discriminatory Black Laws that buttressed their position on the place of black residents within the state and mirrored other states in the Old Northwest. Law and civil society worked together in pursuit of racially homogenous communities and states.

The first Ohio State Constitution ratified in 1803, enfranchised white males over the age of twenty-one who had paid taxes and lived in the state for at least one year prior to any election.

Likewise, the first Indiana Constitution in 1816, and the Illinois Constitution in 1818, also bestowed voting rights on white males over the age of twenty-one who had lived in the state for at least one year. The Illinois Constitution also stipulated that the state militia would be populated by free abled bodied men between eighteen and forty-five years old with free blacks and Native Americans being specifically excluded.317 The only explicit mentions of Native

Americans in these early Constitutions is the explicit stipulation that Indians were excluded from service in the Indiana and Illinois state militias, alongside free blacks.

317 Constitution of the State of Illinois November 16, 1818 (Washington City: E. De Krafft, 1818), 14.

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The insertion white as a qualifier for male suffrage statutes represented a unique modification in constitutionalism for states carved out of the Northwest Territory. These states had ostensibly committed themselves to Revolutionary Era principles that “all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent and indefeasible rights” and that “every person within this state ought to find a certain remedy in the laws, for all injuries or wrongs which he may receive in his person, property, or character; he ought to obtain right and justice freely.”318 The Ohio and Indiana constitutions sought to explicitly outlaw slavery and servitude within each respective state. In Illinois, where the French had introduced black slavery in the eighteenth century, the state constitution departed and created a system of indentured servitude and gradual emancipation that freed the children of enslaved black and mixed race persons at the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Collectively Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois created governments to be specifically governed by white men since all three constitutions only empowered white men with the ability to vote and hold office.319

Anti-black Ohio state legislation can be traced back to two legal acts in 1804 and 1807.

In 1804, the Ohio General Assembly passed An Act to Regulate Black and Mulatto persons. This law controlled black immigration and residency within Ohio. It deterred free blacks from moving to Ohio without official certification of their freedom, established fines for aiding fugitive runaways and for employers hiring free blacks without freedom certificates, and instituted twelve-cent registration fees for any black persons already living in Ohio and hopeful immigrants. In 1807, the Ohio General Assembly amended the previous law passed in 1804. This

318 Constitution of the State of Illinois November 16, 1818 (Washington City: E. De Krafft, 1818), 16-17. 319 SIddlani argued that the implementation of these racially exclusive statutes and provisions were not without a “profound moral struggle.” Silvana R. Siddali, Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest, 4.

154 time the Ohio legislature stymied black immigration through its requirement that prospective black immigrants “enter into a bond with two or more freehold sureties” and pay a five hundred dollar fee that guaranteed their good behavior, which also functioned as insurance for poor relief.320 The stipulation that two white citizens had to corroborate the character and financial means for potential black immigrants meant that white Ohioans were required to act as guardians for surveillance over free blacks. Many free blacks in Cincinnati could not afford the $500 fee and evaded it; their residence in the state was thus transformed and made illegal.

Most notably, the 1807 addition also included a section that stipulated no black or mulatto person could testify in court against any white person. The testimony section particularly exposed black Ohio residents to criminal and predatory actions of their white neighbors through being legally excluded from testimony against white peers in Ohio courts.321 The bedrock of

Ohio’s Black Laws endeavored to protect the state from potential controversies over slavery and fugitive runaways, preserve state sovereignty, and stand firm against slavery’s expansion. Ohio expanded its Black Laws that excluded free blacks from tax funded public schools, but also prevented illegal kidnappings of black residents. Ohio secured and enforced some protections for free blacks. However, the Black Laws and the white only militia and suffrage statutes effectively established the state as “a community for whites.”322

320 Stephen Middleton has argued that anti-black statutes originated within the Ohio Constitution with the insertion of whiteness as a qualification suffrage rights and militia participation. Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 17. 321 In an illuminating account of the free black Lyles family living in southern Illinois in the 1850s, Cox details how the successful property owning family was forced to flee for their lives after a local white mob attacked their home. The violence was precipitated by the fact the Lyles family had only been levied with fines and not jail time after being falsely accused of assault. Anna-Lisa Cox, The bone and sinew of the land : America's forgotten black pioneers & the struggle for equality (New York : Hachette Book Group, 2018), 181-187. 322 Middleton argues that the creation of Ohio’s black laws were discourage the settlement of free blacks in Ohio as a sanctuary from the institution of slavery. Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 43. Dana Weiner agrees with this assessment and goes into much further detail articulating that “with these laws legislators intended to minimize interracial

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In Illinois, citizens enacted its first law to prevent black immigration in 1813 while still a territory prior to statehood, which came in 1818. This territorial law made it illegal for free blacks to migrate into Illinois Territory and required any already present free blacks living in

Illinois to register with the local court within six months or be subject to forceful expulsion from the territory. In 1829, the Illinois General Assembly bolstered the law by requiring that free blacks could not enter the state unless they posted a bond and levied fines against persons seeking to use Illinois as a space to free their enslaved property.

In 1829, the highest court in Hamilton County, Ohio ruled that state laws on black immigration were legal under the state constitution. In turn, the city of Cincinnati informed its black residents “that they must leave in thirty days, or the law, which requires that they shall individually give bonds to the amount of $500, will be put in force against them.”323 Local white residents had decided to enforce the state law and compel a forced exodus of the city’s free black population in total. White citizens of Cincinnati deemed “this class of people as a serious evil among us” where “the only remedy afforded is to colonize them in their mother country.”324 At the end of the thirty day deadline, when some black residents had failed to leave the city, white citizens rioted and perpetrated mob violence in the free black community that forced black residents to flee the city. A number of them relocated across the northern border in Ontario,

Canada.325

interactions, either by forcing African Americans to relocate or by making life so uncomfortable that any of their settlements would be small.” Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: fighting slavery and prejudice in the Old Northwest (DeKalb, Illinois : NIU Press, 2013), 42. 323 “Colored People in Ohio” The Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, Ohio) July 22, 1829. 324 “Colored People in Ohio” The Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, Ohio) July 22, 1829. 325 Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of freedom: Cincinnati's Black community, 1802-1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 50-79.

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The Ohio General Assembly was often times ambivalent over the present state and future direction of the Black Laws. They received petitions from all over the state with some counties that implored stricter laws to further prevent black immigration, while other residents advocated for Black Law repeals in order to aid black Ohio residents. A special committee in the state

House of Representatives in 1829 submitted resolutions for a western settlement of free blacks as well as more laws to inhibit black immigration. They also sent a memorial to Congress that pleaded for support and financial aid for the colonization movement. Ohio politicians were primarily concerned with the influx of manumitted blacks and were “compelled, by a regard for her own safety, to throw off an insupportable grievance, thus inflicted upon her by the operation of the laws of other States.” For Ohio politicians, free blacks remained a threat to the civil and political security of their home state.326

Throughout the antebellum years as the state’s black population gradually increased, petitions from free blacks and their allies inundated the Ohio Legislature. Both the state House and the Senate periodically sent the petitions to special committees that determined the best course of action for the state over the Black Laws. An 1834 Ohio House committee reported that it was not an appropriate time to repeal the Black Laws because such an action might offend bordering slave states. It also asserted that repeal would not improve the lot of free blacks and would potentially jeopardize the safety of white Ohioans. Committee members supported their conclusion in a brief historical review that revisited the Ohio Constitutional Convention’s decision that made white a qualifier for suffrage rights. The official report claimed that

the object of this disfranchisement was, it is presumed, to prevent the migration hither of that unfortunate race; not from any callous or careless feeling for their unhappy

326 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio: Being the First Session of the Twenty-Eighth General Assembly (Columbus: Olmsted & Bailhache state printers, 1829), 138.

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condition, but for the purpose of self preservation, from evils which might arise by the introduction of a class of population degraded and debased in other states.327 Foremost in the eyes of Ohio’s constitutional framers, and over thirty years later in the state legislature, was the safety of the Ohio and its actual citizens. Ohio politicians believed that a racially homogenous state remained important to its future development. The committee report went on to assert that free blacks in Ohio were in no better condition than the enslaved in

Kentucky since, “They are excluded from social intercourse with the whites, and whatever of education you may give them, will not tend to elevate their standing, to any considerable extent.”328

The customary immigration statutes of the Black Laws endeavored to deter black immigration into the Northwest. Bond requirements sought to deter the migration of free blacks and redirect them any place else. These anti-black immigration statutes functioned as legal barriers erected to shield the Northwest from the influx of free blacks. They dovetailed seamlessly with colonizationist schemes in the Northwest that aspired to deport black inhabitants to Liberia. The Black Laws sought to chart specific trajectories of black movement from the

Northwest and around these free states. In part, African colonization desired control over the movement and migration of free blacks and the Black Laws provided the necessary stimulus that drove colonizationists’ zeal and actions.329

In an 1837 Ohio Senate select committee report on petitions to repeal the state’s Black

Laws, Ohio representatives argued that the state’s collective antislavery stance that promoted

327 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio: Being the First Session of the Thirty-third General Assembly (Columbus: Olmsted & Bailhache state printers, 1834), 791. 328 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Ohio: Being the First Session of the Thirty-third General Assembly (Columbus: Olmsted & Bailhache state printers, 1834), 791. 329 Dana Weiner, Race and Rights: fighting slavery and prejudice in the Old Northwest (DeKalb, Illinois : NIU Press, 2013), 43.

158 gradual emancipation in the South, prompted the Ohio General Assembly to enact “the most odious and oppressive laws, to degrade and depress this portion [free blacks] of our population.”330 This legislative action was necessary to avoid the entanglements of slavery’s governance and project Ohio’s sovereignty in opposition to the growing reach of slavery. In more precise and direct language, the committee reported that lawmakers never intended that the immigration statue, which required a five hundred dollar bond and approval of two white citizens, would be readily fulfilled. In reality, “its evident design was to drive this portion of our population into other States.”331 The committee report elaborated further that through “the plausible pretext of disobedience to those requirements, they [free blacks] were to be cast out from amongst us, placed beyond the protection of law, and deprived of the means of procuring sustenance and support.”332 The Ohio General Assembly sought to make discriminatory laws that would be nearly impossible to comply with simply to coerce free blacks into residing anywhere but Ohio. An 1842 Ohio House select committee reported on petitions requesting additional statutes added to the Black Laws. In particular, some petitions requested an end to all black abilities to contract, in any manner, in the hope that this would drive free blacks out of the state.

The Ohio House replied that until such time as an “adequate provision has been made for their

[free blacks] separate colonization,” that they could not support such a law because it “would effectually deprive them of all the means of subsistence, excepting such as might be bestowed by

330 Middleton, Stephen, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 57. 331 Middleton, Stephen, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 60. 332 Middleton, Stephen, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 60.

159 the hand of charity.”333 Most likely, the House took this stance as a fiscally responsible position lest free blacks subsist almost entirely from tax funded poor relief.334

By the 1840s, Illinois required all free black residents to register themselves and their entire families with local clerks to make clear records of their free status, which required official corroboration to certify their freedom. It also levied hefty fines on any citizens or residents of

Illinois who harbored or employed black persons who were not registered and whom could not present paperwork that certified their free status. The law stated “Every black or mulatto person who shall be found in this State, and not having such a certificate as is required by this chapter, shall be deemed a runaway slave or servant.”335 These laws ostensibly endeavored to diminish the activities of persons who aided fugitive runaways and diminish the number of fugitive runaways fleeing to or traversing through Illinois. However, the practical effect of it criminalized black autonomy and independence, made white citizens actors of the state with police power, and brought the state into the direct governance and regulation of black families.

Increasingly, year by year, the free states became more hardened in its stance against black immigration, especially free border states.336 An 1847 editorial on the recent Illinois constitutional convention stood in support of African colonization since “the only safe and sure

333 Middleton, Stephen, The Black laws in the Old Northwest: a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 93. 334 Property ownership was central in this debate. Legislators in the Northwest sought to protect the ability to buy and sell property and protect homesteads for residents and citizens as a method to stem the necessity for tax funded poor relief. Silvana R. Siddali, Frontier democracy: constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 238. Hirota’s recent work on early America reveals the ways in which poverty functioned as catalyst for forced emigration in ways similar to race. Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the poor : Atlantic Seaboard states and the nineteenth-century origins of American immigration policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 335 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 295. 336 Weiner, Dana, Race and Rights: fighting slavery and prejudice in the Old Northwest (DeKalb: NIU Press, 2013), 43-45.

160 method of elevating the African race, and conferring upon them those civil, social, and political privileges which are the common birth-right of the human family is to separate them from the

Anglo-Saxon race.”337 The editorial’s author even claimed that only the states most secure and confident that it would not have a high number of black immigrants were emboldened to pass legislation that delegated civil and social equality to free blacks. The writer asserted that if large numbers of free blacks did in fact migrate to these states, then such laws would surely be rescinded and remarked that even abolitionists remained unwilling to take on scores of free blacks if the enslaved happened to be emancipated. The op-ed author stated that “so long, then as you must sit, stand, walk, ride, dwell, eat, sleep here and the negro there, he cannot be free in any part of the country. His home is not here.”338 The unnamed author anticipated the day when free blacks would recognize the reality of their situation and seek to emigrate of their own volition, paying their own way in transportation to Liberia.

In 1847, the Illinois Senate judiciary made a report that responded to a petition that had asked for the repeal of the Black Laws and all statutes that made distinctions between black residents and white citizens. The judiciary’s response was succinct and direct as it opened by asserting that “the petition cannot be granted, because the grant of it would be to disregard the best interests of the citizens of this State” as well as contradict the Illinois Constitution.339 The

Senate Judiciary’s primary concern and explanation to reject the petition noted that repealing laws that distinguished “between the negro and the white man, would be to invite an emigration of emancipated negroes to become residents of this State, by thousands, and thereby increase an

337 “Condition of the free People of Color in the free States: Arguments for Colonization,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 23, no. 10 (Oct. 1847), 304. 338 “Condition of the free People of Color in the free States: Arguments for Colonization,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 23, no. 10 (Oct. 1847), 304. 339 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 298.

161 evil already felt in this State.”340 The report insisted that no law could be enacted to make black residents and white citizens equal and that if free blacks were “not content with the provisions of our laws” then they should leave and migrate to Africa “where he may test the powers of his mind for self-government.”341 Illinois state representatives viewed black equality as only possible through colonization to Liberia. Similar to colonizationist ideology, they viewed space as a solution to their own denial of racial equality and anxieties of living in a racially equal society.

The latter part of the 1840s witnessed a positive change for Ohio activists seeking repeal of the Black Laws. Free blacks in Ohio used the Colored Convention Movement as a space to organize and articulate their social and political ambitions. The local Ohio state convention petitioned the state legislature and agitated for the repeal of all of Ohio’s Black Laws. They focused on the right of suffrage, repeal of the testimony law, and exclusion from common schools. An 1845 Ohio House committee assessed the state of the Black Laws and actually advised that they should be repealed on the grounds that legal disabilities imposed on free blacks were unconstitutional and an impediment to their progress. A subsequent 1846 select committee drew a similar conclusion and also advised for a repeal of the Black Laws. In 1849, the General

Assembly voted to amend the Black Laws that removed statutes that excluded black Ohioans from being taxed and unequal participants in the common schools fund. However, it still resulted in segregated schools for white and black children.

340 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 298. 341 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 299.

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In 1852, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law that appropriated five thousand dollars “for the colonization of Negroes and mulattoes and their descendants.”342 In conjunction with the State Board of Colonization the legislature sought to purchase land in Liberia “to be styled the Indiana colony” for the colonization of free blacks from Indiana for which they would receive one hundred acres of land. The next year in 1853, the Indiana legislature made the five thousand dollar sum an annual expenditure for the state budget. The same year, they also made it illegal for Indians and blacks “to testify as a witness in any cause in which any white person is a party in interest.”343 This followed a previous 1831 law that stipulated that neither free blacks nor

Indians could testify except in cases against other free blacks and Indians.

In 1857, the Illinois Legislature convened a special select committee to respond to several petitions from free black residents and their white allies in Illinois that again requested the repeal of the black laws with specific interests in the right to testify in courts, an end to segregated schools, and suffrage rights. The select committee responded by asserting that white citizens retained the ability to send their children to interracial schools if they so desired, but that it would not require by law that white children had to learn alongside black children. However, their response to suffrage and testimony rights was indicative of their conception of Illinois at its best.

The committee stated directly,

that this is a government of the white man and established for the white man, and while the black man is alike with the white man protected by law in the enjoyment of his property, his liberty and his life, the minority of your committee can see no good reason for complaint on the part of the colored race or their peculiar friends, because the colored

342 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 219. 343 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 246.

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people may not be admitted into a full participation of all the rights of a government established for the white race.344 The committee then referenced Liberia as a site where black men could enjoy suffrage rights alluding to colonization as a solution to racialized legal disability in Illinois. However, regardless of their intermittent enforcement the Black Laws constructed free blacks as unbelonging, which had material effects on their abilities to contract, protect, and support their families. Writing in the 1860s, still seeking the full repeal of the Black Laws in Illinois, black abolitionist John Jones asserted that “I know that many friends think the black laws are a dead letter altogether, but I propose to show,” in contrast “that they are a living, active reality” for black residents in

Illinois.345

Legal disability delegated white citizens with police power, specifically the Black Laws that required free blacks to be certified and approved for residence by white citizens. Free black residents had to have white sureties that asserted themselves as safe, free persons of means, in order to move into and live in the Northwest. Discriminatory legislation empowered white citizens to be state actors with authority and police over blacks simply through requiring their signatory approval to live in the Northwest. This placed free blacks at the whimsical compassion of whites in communities that they lived or labored. They had to cultivate and make sure that they had a good reputation among white citizens in order to secure their continued approval necessary to be able to reside in the Northwest.

In their opposition to the ACS, black anticolonization work necessarily involved petitioning against the Black Laws and legal disability in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Free blacks

344 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws in the Old Northwest : a documentary history (New York: Greenwood Press, 1993), 304. 345 John Jones, The Black Laws of Illinois, and a Few Reasons Why They Should be Repealed. Page (Chicago: Tribune Book and Job Office, 1864), 13.

164 understood, through their lived experience of exclusion and marginalization, the levels to which their ability to construct, maintain, protect, and support their families and communities were inhibited by unjust Black Laws on education, testimony, residence, and immigration. They also remained keenly aware of the ways that colonizationists utilized their legal disability and the marginalization that the Black Laws created as validation that colonization was the best and most plausible path forward to support and improve free black life, as well as to protect developing states in the Northwest. As such, free blacks disparaged the Black Laws as undemocratic and unbecoming of the nation. Their criticism of the Black Laws disputed colonizationist claims of benevolence and inverted that claim by asserting that the only stigma attributable to them came by way of the Black Laws and not out of some inherent natural result as part of their race or color.

The Black Convention Movement in the Old Northwest provides a window into free blacks’ response and petitions to end the Black Laws. The 1844 Ohio State Convention submitted that “we know not how we can appropriately appeal to your sense of duty, your moral obligation and your fearful responsibility, without again reciting some of the weighty considerations emanating from the great abuse of power manifested in the enactment and prosecution of such a barbarous code of misnamed laws.”346

At the 1850 Ohio state convention, William Howard Day argued that citizens of Ohio should remove the word white as a qualifier in the state constitution. In its Declaration of

Sentiments the convention asserted that free blacks in Ohio “are cursed by the blighting influence of oppression in this professedly free State, to which many of us have fled for refuge and

346 “Address of the State Convention” The Palladium of Liberty (Columbus, OH) November 13, 1844.

165 protection.”347 The previous year in 1849, the Ohio General Assembly had repealed a portion of the Black Laws in the state concerning the testimony and immigration bans and established segregated schools for free blacks.348 However, black residents in Ohio held no false impression that their work had reached a swift conclusion. As Henry Hurd stated in a letter written to the

Convention, “though our burthen has been removed to some extent: yet the yoke is not broken.”349 The primary concerns of black Ohio residents at the 1851 annual convention meeting was the struggle to earn male suffrage rights within the state.

At the 1853 Illinois Convention held in Chicago, meeting attendees named their primary concerns as repeal of the Black Laws, public education for their children, and agricultural development in black communities. They asserted that “we have protested, and shall continue to protest, against those unjust, unconstitutional, and undemocratic laws by which we and our children are proscribed.”350 Attendees derided the Black Laws and attested to their inhibitions on education.

Throughout Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois attendees at Black Convention meetings regularly denounced and opposed the Colonization society and its scheme.351 Black Laws sought to coerce free blacks into emigration. Black anticolonization, that centered petitioning against the Black

Laws as fundamental to anticolonization activism, argued for social and political rights for free

347 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 241-255. 348 Stephen Middleton, The Black laws: Race and the legal process in early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005), 153 349 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 Vol. I (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 241-255. 350 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 Vol. II (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 59. 351 Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker. eds., Proceedings of the Black State conventions, 1840-1865 Vol. II (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1979), 60.

166 blacks as a way to combat, not only the myths about black degradation and hopelessness spread by colonization supporters, but also as a way to empower themselves and ground themselves as a constituent part of the nation.

Indians, treaties, and legal disability

Native Americans and American antebellum law presents a seemingly peculiar case on legal disability in the Northwest, given that the federal government had official jurisdiction over

Native peoples and determined their interactions and relationship with the nation. However, local officials actually held a considerable amount of influence over dictating course of Native governance. After all, local citizens were on the frontlines of supplanting Indian territories and turning it into American settlements and communities. In turn, Native legal disability pressured

Native people into seeking the aid of white citizens to pursue legal recourse when they deemed it necessary. White citizens petitioned for and squatted on Indian lands. Ohio and Indiana citizens faced the potential blowback of Native violence. All this meant that states actively dictated, policed, reported, and requested authority to govern the interactions between Native bands and the United States. Local governors, Indian agents, and state officials negotiated Indian treaties in the Northwest. Therefore, even though Indian treaties were official documents between sovereign Indian nations and the federal government, local officials and citizens in the Northwest determined the legal terms and outcomes in ways beneficial to themselves.

Colin Calloway has argued that treaties with Native nations “functioned as stepping- stones of empire” since they were “the primary instruments by which an Indian continent passed

167 into non-Indian hands, and tribal homelands were transformed into real estate.”352 However,

Indian treaties functioned as more than tools of dispossession. Treaties dictated the possibilities and limits of Native recourse in terms of specifically enforced treaty stipulations and the participants, timing, and sites of Native redress.

In 1809, Ohio banned the barter or sale of alcohol to Indians within the state without proper certification to do so. Persons violating the law faced a fine of up to one hundred dollars.

Illinois outlawed all sales of alcohol to Native people in 1823. These statutes sought to protect both Native people and white citizens from the abuses and exploitation of unscrupulous traders.

Native legal disability had odd effects at times. In the midst of removal in the Northwest in the 1830s, the Yellow River band of Potawatomi, led by Pokagon, survived removal because several members retained their small reservations or purchased land from local whites in

Michigan. Property ownership shielded them from removal but as a result Indian affairs officials denied them the ability to share in future annuity payments.353

In the absence of extensive laws on Indians, states enacted laws that governed the terms, ability, and prohibitions for white citizen’s interactions with Native Americans. Samuel Milroy’s

Indiana Indian agency reported in 1840 that it had been state law deeming it illegal to sell alcohol to Indians for years, but that illegal traders had developed ways to get around the law, sometimes by posing as Indians of mixed race heritage to gain access to local Miamis. “These individuals purchase whiskey in large quantities, and retail it to the Indians, and do not hold themselves amenable to the State laws; and, so far, have not been prosecuted for violations of the

352 Colin G. Calloway, Pen and ink witchcraft treaties and treaty making in American Indian history (New York : Oxford University Press, 2013), 2. 353 Edmunds, R. David, The Potawatomis, keepers of the fire (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 266.

168 law referred to.”354 Milroy cited the negative effects of alcohol on Miami communities as a reason to support and call for their removal from Indiana and colonization in the West.

In 1841, the state of Indiana enacted legislation that stipulated any and all future contracts made between free blacks or white citizens with Native Americans were void. The law also denied the ability for free blacks or white citizens to collect debts from previous contracts with

Native Americans. The Indiana General Assembly sought to close a loophole in which property ownership enabled Native people to withstand legal justifications of removal over land held in trust for Native bands.355

In an October 1847 letter written to Charles Cist, Indian agent John Johnston, who had previously worked at the Ft. Wayne agency before being transferred to the Wyandot in Ohio, stated that,

For long experience has satisfied me that in small communities surrounded by a white

population, it was in vain to attempt the enforcement of the laws made for their

protection. We always failed and always would fail in going before the Civil tribunals

where the Indians were parties. In innumerable instances were they robbed and murdered

in time of peace by our Citizens, and no redress at law could be had.356

According to Johnston, the only time in his “fifty four years of western adventure were white men tried convicted and executed for murdering Indians” was the Fall Creek Massacre of 1824,

354 Extract from the report of Samuel Milroy, sub-agent, Indiana, Box 6525, Folder Potawatomi, 1838-1840, Potawatomi 1600-1898, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 355 Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and state law : sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 221. 356 John Johnston to Charles Cist, October 22, 1847, Box 5023, Folder Miami, 1834-1837, Miami, 1600-1864, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

169 which fell under his Indian agency in Indiana.357 Indian agents, as well as local white citizens were well aware that interactions between white settlers and citizens and Native Americans were unevenly policed and often times Indians had little recourse against white citizens.

States in the Northwest had few legal statutes on Indians because of the inexact nature of the governance and management of Indian relations. In terms of official policy, all relations remained governed and dictated on a federal level and Indians fell under the jurisdiction of federal government regardless of the states in which they resided. However, in practical execution of these policies local actors drove most of the timing and execution of treaties and other interactions in the Northwest. Federal jurisdiction hindered states from enacting laws that governed Indians, but that does not mean that they were totally out of the purview of laws and courts that made policies and decisions that affected Native life.

Removal in the Northwest failed in transporting all Native people from the Northwest west of the Mississippi River. Native persons fled from forced removals and some used their wealth and status as independent land owners to escape social pressures and militia raids that sought their expulsion from the Northwest. As such, this presented a crisis for some Native people who were able to maintain residence in the Northwest. Racialized legal disability in Ohio,

Indiana, and Illinois restricted Native Americans from testifying against white citizens in courts, entering into contracts, voting, and a host of other legal disabilities. One such instance involved a small group of Native Americans in Indiana who survived removal only to become destitute, struggling to survive in this new reality.

357 John Johnston to Charles Cist, October 22, 1847, Box 5023, Folder Miami, 1834-1837, Miami, 1600-1864, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

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In July 1847, a writ of habeas corpus directed to fur trader Alexis Coquillard, had been brought before presiding Judge Alphonso Cole in Miami Circuit Court in Miami County,

Indiana. Coquillard had detained a group of Native Americans living near Deer Creek as he claimed “them to be Miamies for the purpose of removing them West of the Mississippi.”358

Subsequent testimony proved to Judge Cole that they were not Miamis, but in fact were Eel

River Indians and that early settlers along with the Miami and the Weas were all aware that they were part of the Eel River band.359 Cole discharged them from detainment as his ruling in the case. In April 1848, Alphonso Cole wrote to William Medill, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, about the small group of Eel River Indians, numbering no more than twenty people, who were no longer receiving their annuity payments and had “been left entirely without any resources.”360

The men of the group had died leaving mostly women and children who had “frequently stated their grievances to some of their white friends” but had been unable to get the matter addressed by the Office of Indian Affairs.361 Cole attested to the fact that these people were in fact part of the Eel River band and thus rightfully owed their part of the yearly annuity payments. John

Sinclear, another Indian agent, also wrote to Medill on their behalf claiming that even though their small group had come to be identified as Weas, they were in fact members of the late Eel

River band that entered into treaty with John Tipton and the United States in 1828.

358 Great Lakes - Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, 1953-1966 Special file 112 Letter to Medill April 10, 1848, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 359 Eel River Indians were often confused as Miami but not actually Miami Indians. They were most likely Potawatomis. 360 Letter to Medill, April 10, 1848, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 361 Letter to Medill, April 10, 1848, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

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In effect, these Native Americans had to first prove their membership and status as recognized members of the Eel River band before they could start a conversation about receiving their portion of the annuity payments. The Eel River group had procured affidavits from local white citizens that certified that they were in fact who they claimed to be as members of the Eel

River Band and the exact persons who had been party to the original treaty. In 1849, the Eel

River group appointed Judge Cole as their attorney to represent them in all proceedings in the object of receiving their annuity payments. By February of 1850, Cole was still writing on their behalf that they were entitled to Miami annuities currently and owed previously unpaid annuity payments because the Miami chiefs had wrongfully excluded them from payouts and the Indian agent at the time did not take actions to correct this exclusion. Cole wrote that he had “procured the affidavits of Messrs Avaline and Miller because I believe there are not two other white men living who are as well acquainted with these people.”362 Avaline and Miller being honorable white men would go far in supporting Cole’s claim that this remaining Eel River group was rightfully owed annuity payments that they had been a party to in a previous treaty agreement.

Avaline’s affidavit testified that the Eel river group was “residing upon and cultivating a piece of land owned in fee simple by one of their number, and though poor they are honest, sober, and industrious and less degraded than Indians are generally found” to be.363 Cole ended his letter to Medill by stating, “this little tribe of Eel Rivers are poor but honest and industrious and that they have been grossly imposed upon and their rights outraged” as he requested that they be properly paid.364 Cole asserted that this would fulfill treaty negotiations and not be any

362 Letter to Brown, February 18, 1850, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 363 Letter to Brown, February 18, 1850, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University. 364 Letter to Brown, February 18, 1850, Box 203, Folder Special File 112, Transcribed Document Series, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Collection, Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, Indiana University.

172 type of action above and beyond on the part of Medill. This would only be carrying out already established treaty obligations.

The sources do not bear out evidence as to what the ultimate outcome of this dispute over treaty annuity payments. However, this episode provides an opportunity to explore social interactions for Native Americans in the Northwest after removal and in the context of racialized legal disability. The Eel River band’s ability to escape removal, for a second time, relied on white testimony and corroboration that they were who they proclaimed to be. Legal disability required white citizens to speak for them and act for them as proxy in the judicial system. While this group of Native Americans received a favorable decision from Judge Cole, this episode is still indicative of the ways that racialized legal disability empowered white citizens as guardians of society and bestowed the right to residence upon Indians only because white citizens endorsed their claims.

Much like bond requirements required white citizens to surveil and certify black residents and potential black immigrants, here white citizens had to speak on behalf of the Eel River band or else they could face removal, even as they lived on land individually owned by one member.

Native legal disability made them dependent on white citizens. Racialized legal disability not only excluded nonwhites, bestowed white citizens with police power, but also managed to turn civic duty into white benevolence. Even in the absence of extensive legislation that marginalized

Native Americans, legal disability still dictated the boundaries of Indian life.

Indian Removal had created the perception that Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were without a large Indian presence, but not without any Indian presence. As a result of colonization and legal disability, Indians who escaped removal were left outside of society and in need of white charity to access courts to attain rightful annuity payments or sale of land if they so desired.

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Colonization as a rhetorical and physical tool sanctioned continued Native legal disability.

Excluding Native Americans from suffrage, or common schools, or testimony rights would not seem undemocratic because Indians had already been expunged from these states and therefore

Native legal disability did not contradict the benevolence of colonization but in fact validated it as such. Native legal disability turned the civic responsibilities of white citizens into white charity, as Native people required the aid of white citizens to access the judicial system.

Through a legal construction of the genealogical limits of whiteness, laws did in fact dictate how, where, and when Indians could work, construct, protect, and improve Indian families. In addition, the sporadic enforcement of laws enabled white citizens to use the legal system to sue and prosecute Indians successfully. White citizens also petitioned the federal government to help achieve their goals in interactions with Indians. Federal jurisdiction obstructed the enactment of extensive legislation to govern local Indian residents, but white citizens still developed several methods to interact and pursue their own goals with Native inhabitants, sometimes legal and sometimes extralegal.

Colonizationists used racialized legal disability as justification for the benevolence of colonization rhetoric and schemes. The logic of colonization, in benevolence, protection, and national benefit, was expressed legally through laws that marginalized and excluded Natives and free blacks. Colonization and legal disability had a synergy and thrived off each other in forging state development in the nineteenth century. Legal disability not only sought and maintained a white republic, but it also pushed Natives and free blacks to the margins intentionally, so that they would seek to emigrate of their own volition to places free from white racism and legal disability. Legal disabilities intended to deter nonwhite residence and encourage Indians and free blacks to leave these states and emigrate somewhere, anywhere else.

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Legal disability placed Indians, free blacks, and their families in a precarious state that rendered them at the mercurial disposition white citizens. The violence of legal disability was not always physical bodily injury or theft of property precisely because there was limited legal recourse that nonwhites could pursue. The violence of legal disability also extended to the ways in which nonwhites had to perform their public and private lives in ways that cultivated both white citizens respect but also white citizens’ amity by necessity. Black bond requirements or racialized testimony laws that excluded nonwhite testimony against white subjects necessitated that nonwhite inhabitants generally cultivate white goodwill in the ever present threat that they required a white citizen to speak on their behalf in court proceedings. This was especially true for nonwhite persons and families who simply could not afford legal representation. Racialized legal disability that empowered white citizens with police power transformed their acts of civic duty into benevolence and charity, not unlike the benevolence that colonizationists exalted in terms of their removal schemes. In similar ways, black laws and treaties sought to shrink and narrow the ability for nonwhite residents to access and use the legal system to enforce treaty terms, seek redress, and protect their property and families in ways that made Indians tenants and free blacks inhabitants.

Admixture cases

Anti-black and anti-Indian legal statutes in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were tested in states courts, sometimes through admixture cases.365 Admixture judicial decisions further

365 Historians have recovered race, color, and status trials of nineteenth century America. In What Blood Won’t Tell, author Ariela Gross situated judicial decisions that determined racial identity within the narrative of legal citizenship and belonging in the body politic. Gross posited that Americans interpreted the meaning of race “when they needed to adjudicate its boundaries.” Ariela Gross, What Blood won’t Tell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

175 bolstered legal disability and the ideals of colonizationists by drawing racial identity boundaries that also articulated the boundaries of inclusion to the body politic. Court cases on race or color and anti-colonizationist rhetoric illustrated how racially discriminatory legislation and civil society were tethered together in efforts to make racially homogenous states. These judicial decisions generally rested on courts determining the amount of white, black, or Indian blood for either plaintiffs or defendants that would dictate an individual’s claim to civic rights or legal protections. State supreme courts eschewed physical appearance as a satisfactory legal way to determine a person’s race or color and subsequently their legal privileges. Admixture decisions coupled with colonization advocates, who consisted of state politicians, clerics, judges, and local citizens, preserved the intent of the discriminatory laws to discourage black and Native residence.366 Racialized legal disability coerced mixed race persons into filing civil suits to claim whiteness as property. These admixture civil suits also compelled white citizens to define and locate race.

In Ohio, admixture cases endowed legal privileges onto some mixed race citizens. In fact, the Ohio Supreme court repeatedly maintained its legal precedent set in Gray v. Ohio in

1831 that concluded mixed race persons of predominately white blood were entitled to the legal privileges of white citizens. However, when placed in the context of colonization and racialized legal disability these two seemingly disparate racialized paths collectively articulated a narrative

University Press, 2008), 11. These borders of race were important to both rights and American identity. In American Indians and State Law historian Deborah Rosen argued that Indians endured similar court cases that determined racial identity to assess individual rights and privileges. Indians faced blood quantum cases that regulated suffrage, inheritance, and land rights. Both of these scholarly works had considerable focus on the state and local courts of the slave south but acknowledged the courts of the antebellum north proceeded similarly. Deborah Rosen, American Indians and state law: sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 366 Deborah Rosen, American Indians and state law: sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790-1880 (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 83-127. Ariela Gross, What Blood won’t Tell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 16-47.

176 in which admixture cases, actually served to further empower the privilege of whiteness. Ohio

Supreme Court decisions presented a legal maneuvering that privileged the power of white blood as an embodied redemptive element.

Legal regimes in the Old Northwest proscribed racialized legal disability that limited the rights of Native Americans and free blacks, especially in regards to their abilities to contract and pursue recourse against white citizens. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois all enacted laws that prevented

Natives and black residents from contracting, passing down property, and testifying in local and state courts where a white person was a party, either as plaintiff or defendant. These laws sought not only to demarcate the boundaries of citizenship, but also to endow individual white citizens with police power over Native Americans and free blacks. These states empowered individual white citizens to be the front line sentries to protect their communities and society from the threats of degraded black residents and Native Americans who eluded dispossession, removal, and violence compelled emigration. In pursuit of these goals, states had to establish a rubric of who constituted white, black, Indian, and mulatto. States also had to define persons of mixed race heritage and determine where they would be located within that rubric and assign their legal place in the racial hierarchy.

This presented a particular problem in the development of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the antebellum period. For starters, these states sought to overlay a specific and definite racialized polity on to communities with a long history mixed race persons not being subjected to such racialized legal disabilities. Mixed race persons represented embodied conundrums as they required legal blood quantum definitions to determine their racial status. Also, this meant that in quotidian experiences and interactions that white citizens functioned as the arbiters of racial identity that empowered, and in some cases required, them to determine who amongst their

177 neighbors, acquaintances, or passing travelers as white and thus allowed to exercise certain rights. In short, the myriad of laws that comprised racialized legal disabilities forced white citizens to determine and locate race as the law had defined it. This impossible task sometimes resulted in admixture legal suits where persons deemed to be of color, sued to claim and assert their whiteness in order to exercise specific rights and legal protections. Admixture cases in the

Old Northwest encouraged and validated persons of mixed race heritage to identify as white and perform their whiteness to transcend racialized legal disabilities. Mixed race persons adapted to white supremacy by suing to be considered legally white since racially discriminatory laws disabled persons deemed Native, black, or mulatto.

In a pair of cases decided in late 1842 Ohio Supreme court justice Ebenezer Lane wrote the court’s ruling opinion in two related suits involving voting rights and persons of mixed race parentage. In the first case, Parker Jeffries had filed suit for damages against the trustees in the town of Zenia in Greene county Ohio. The trustees had refused Jeffries’ vote on account that he was part Indian, specifically having “more than one-fourth Indian blood.”367 The local jury decided in favor of the plaintiff and awarded him six cents and damages but the “case was reserved to determine the law arising upon a special verdict.”368 In Justice Lane’s opinion for the

Supreme Court he mused about the “construction of that passage of the constitution, "free white citizens," whether it excludes from voting all persons having the intermixture of any other blood than that of entirely white persons.”369 Lane acknowledged that in the history of Ohio “many persons of the precise breed of this plaintiff, I mean the offspring of whites and half-breed

Indians” held the right of suffrage, served as local government officials, and one such individual

367 Parker Jeffries v. john Ankeny et. al. 11 OHIO 372; 1842. 368 Parker Jeffries v. john Ankeny et. al. 11 OHIO 372; 1842. 369 Parker Jeffries v. john Ankeny et. Al. 11 OHIO 372; 1842.

178 as current clerk for the court. A sudden change in their rights and privileges would be unanticipated. Justice Lane and Ohio Supreme Court also ruled in favor of Jeffries. Lane noted that the Ohio Constitution identified three types of persons: white, black, and mulatto. The constitution levied disabilities on blacks and mulattos but determined “that all nearer white than black, or of the grade between the mulattoes and the whites, were entitled to enjoy every political and social privilege of the white citizen; that no other rule could be adopted, so intelligible and so practicable as this; and that further refinements would lead to inconvenience, and to no good result.”370 In essence the law determined that persons more white than black were legally white and bestowed with the same rights and privileges as any other white citizen in the state.

In the second case, Edwill Thacker had attempted to vote in a local election for justice of the peace in Wilkesville, in Gallia County, Ohio. The local town’s trustees similarly refused his vote on account that he was noticeably a person of African descent. Thacker then filed a civil suit in the Gallia County Court of Common Pleas that he lost. In the Court of Common Pleas, the court informed the jury “that if the plaintiff had in him any negro blood whatever, he was not entitled to vote at said election.”371 In trail proceedings, Thacker’s attorney, Simeon Nash did not contest that Thacker was of African descent. However, he argued that the Ohio Supreme

Court had ruled in previous cases that persons “being nearer a white than a mulatto, was a white person” and subsequently granted rights or protections in civil suits accordingly. Nash challenged whether the court would continue to rule in such a manner on these related admixture cases, and if so then his plaintiff would have to be acknowledged as a lawful voter. Lane’s opinion was short and determined that Thacker’s case should be judged by the same principle as

370 Parker Jeffries v. john Ankeny et. Al. 11 OHIO 372; 1842. 371 Edwill Thacker v. John Hawk et. al 11 OHIO 376; 1842.

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Jeffries v. Ankeny et al. He decided that the court of common pleas had wrongfully instructed the jury that the presence of any amount of “negro blood” disqualified Thacker from the right to vote.

Admixture cases in Ohio frequently rendered decisions just like that of Thacker v. Hawk and ruled that mixed race persons more white than black or Indian were entitled to various rights customarily reserved for white Ohioans. In judicial terms, Justice Read’s minority dissent contended for a strict interpretation of whiteness and citizenship. While some mixed race citizens won legal suits, admixture cases had little affect on the conditions of persons legally deemed black or mulatto and consequently excluded from citizenship. However, Justice Read’s dissenting opinion shed light onto the connections between the Black Laws’ intent, ideology of colonization, and racial anxieties. Anti-black legislation and white qualifiers in the state

Constitution functioned to prevent future black immigration and persuade current black residents to leave the state. Ohioans, from politicians and clergy to colonizationists and anti-slavery activists, surmised that the Black Laws degraded free blacks that mirrored their belief about slavery’s effects. More pointedly, as Justice Read remarked, free blacks in Ohio “must be miserable and degraded” to induce them to leave. Otherwise, black immigration and residence could result in an uncontrollable growth of the black population in Ohio.372

In both of these court cases trustees had to visually determine a potential voter’s race in order to determine if the individual was legally eligible to cast a vote. As such, trustees and other white citizens performing public services served on the front lines of racial determination and

372 Edwin Stanton ed., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Ohio (Columbus: Samuel Medary, State Printer, 1844), 384.

180 wielded police power along such lines in locating and excluding persons they perceived to be nonwhite.

In a different court case the next year in 1843, Justice Lane also wrote the Ohio Supreme

Court’s opinion concerning mixed race persons and public school access. In this case, the court ruled in favor of Thomas Lane who had sued for the admission of his children to the local common school. Thomas Lane had initially been rebuffed in his enrollment efforts as his children were of mixed race parentage and excluded from admission because legally this particular common school was intended for white children. Lane won his lawsuit as the court cited that his children were more white than black or Indian and thus legally considered white and eligible to attend the common school. In his opinion, Justice Lane cited Jeffries and

Thacker’s civil suits as precedent to rule in favor of Thomas Lane.373 Beyond trustees who determined lawful electors, school board directors were also forced to determine race and the subsequent privileges or disabilities to flow from that visual presumption.

Indiana also faced similar issues concerning the rights of mixed race persons and required state courts to determine race and as a result, the rights of individuals. In an 1856 case, the

Miami Circuit Court in Miami county, Indiana had ruled in favor of a man by the name of

Avaline and upheld his right to land he had purchased. The land in question had been the original property of Catherine Lasselle who was the daughter of late Miami chief Jean Baptiste

Richardville. Through numerous treaties, Richardville had acquired considerable means and some property in land as the Miami chief. Catherine’s first husband was Francis LaFontaine who had also been a property owning Miami Chief. In late 1848 Catherine, now a widow, married

373 Thomas Lane v. Matthias Baker, Gideon Sphar, and John Ginn, 12 Ohio 237; 1843.

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Francis Lasselle. They were married for less than two months before she died and her will bequeathed her land to Francis who then sold it to Avaline. Catherine’s family sued Avaline for rightful ownership of the land. They appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled against

Avaline overturning the lower court’s decision. The Indiana Supreme Court made its decision on the basis that Catherine was three-eighths Indian, so according to state law legally an Indian. As such, the court determined she was not competent to convey her land to Francis through her will because of an 1843 state law that invalidated Native peoples’ ability to contract with anyone in anyway. Here the court had to determine the deceased Catherine’s racial designation in order to decide if her will had been a valid legal document.374

In this period, as a result of legal disability, whiteness in blood was privileged and empowered but also had specific limits. Law disabled nonwhites, which encouraged mixed race persons to lay claim to and sue for their status to be designated as white. Mixed race persons had to prove their whiteness through precise ancestry, or white corroboration to be granted access to specific rights in Ohio and Indiana.

Racialized legal disability not only structured and sanctioned colonization but also demarcated legal boundaries that compelled mixed race persons to claim whiteness. Legal disability dictated the constructions and paths of race that also reinforced fictions of degradation and the benevolence of colonization. Admixture cases reveal that being of mixed race heritage and possessing white blood operated as a privilege that was real in a legal sense. Whiteness in blood functioned as a redeemer for ‘degraded’ people. Being mixed race remained a necessary prerequisite for a tangible pathway to social and political rights.

374 Doe on the demise of Lafontaine and Another v. Avaline, 8 Ind. 6; 1856 Indiana.

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Judges and lawyers had to construct arguments and opinions based on laws that sought to define and police borders of belonging through race, even as race was inherently hard to definitively pinpoint, identify, and prove for individuals. The law dictated that race was definitive and able to be located conclusively and so judges had to make decisions based on that legal fact even though in reality it was not so easy to identify and police. Jurisprudence shaped racial constructions because their decisions on mixed race persons opened a loophole that allowed some nonwhites to attain rights, which meant that being of mixed race parentage remained a privileged position relative to other nonwhite persons. Thus legal disability coerced persons of mixed race parentage to pursue admixture civil suits to claim property in whiteness.

In a four-year span between 1847 and 1851, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all met in state conventions and ratified new state constitutions. These midcentury constitutions sought to deal with “rapid expansion and population growth in the midst of rising sectional tensions” and reassess who comprised the polity and who were citizens in the Northwest.375

The 1847 Illinois Constitution reaffirmed the original constitutional provision that endowed white males over the age of twenty one with voting rights. It also continued a provision from the 1818 Constitution that specifically excluded free blacks, Native Americans and persons of mixed black and white ancestry from participating as part of the state militia. A new section, article fourteen of the new constitution banned “free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state” and slaveholders from seeking to use Illinois as a place to emancipate their

375 Silvana R. Siddali, Frontier democracy: constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 266.

183 human property.376 Article fourteen had been put to a public referendum and voted on by white citizens of Illinois before it was officially added to the state’s new constitution.

The 1851 Ohio Constitution endowed suffrage rights on white male citizens over that age of twenty one. Only white male citizens over eighteen and under forty five were eligible to participate in the state militia. The 1851 Indiana Constitution endowed white male citizens over the age of twenty one with voting rights. It specifically denied blacks and mulattos from suffrage rights. It stipulated that the “militia shall consist of all able-bodied white male persons, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years.”377 In a new section, article thirteen of the Indiana

Constitution, stipulated that “No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.”378 Article thirteen also prohibited making contracts with black immigrants and fined Indiana citizens who would employ black immigrants. Tellingly, this new section of the state constitution also designated that all fines collected in violation of this law would be used to support the colonization of “of such Negroes and Mulattoes, and their descendants, as may be in the State at the adoption of this Constitution, and may be willing to emigrate.”379 These midcentury constitutions sought to provide a course correction of sorts.

White citizens in these states sought to reaffirm their goals to forge their states as white republics.380 In so doing, they strengthened restrictions on black immigration.

376 Constitution of the state of Illinois, adopted by the Convention, assembled at Springfield, June 7, 1847 (Springfield, Ill: Lanphier & Walker, 1847). 377 Constitution of the state of Indiana : and the address of the Constitutional Convention (New Albany, IN: Kent & Norman, 1851). 378 Constitution of the state of Indiana : and the address of the Constitutional Convention (New Albany, IN: Kent & Norman, 1851). 379 Constitution of the state of Indiana : and the address of the Constitutional Convention (New Albany, IN: Kent & Norman, 1851). 380 Siddali argues that midcentury constitutional revisions by states in the Northwest were contested sites of moral struggle as an increasingly diverse region sought to redefine the meanings of American citizenship in the midst of fervent discourses on the place and rights on nonwhites and women in society. Silvana R. Siddali, Frontier

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Northwestern citizens implemented racialized legal disability to deter nonwhite residence and colonization used disability to promote this goal. It rendered them stateless, foreign, putting them at the whim of white citizens, which served the call for colonization and substantiated claims to benevolence. Legal disability also constructed and naturalized race as real and citizenship as a legal and genealogical prerogative. Law constructed the genealogical limits of whiteness and citizenship that displayed that blackness or Indianness could only be redeemed by a predominance of white blood.

While a Herrenvolk democracy was never absolute, the goal of racially homogenous societies offered a positive framework for creating an ideal state. Colonizationism coupled with legal disability demarcated the racialized boundaries of freedom in the Northwest. Even in free states, property owning Native Americans and free blacks were not wholly or equally free. Law also coerced white citizens into upholding racialized legal disability through stipulations that punished them for not upholding their responsibilities as citizens, whether it be selling liquor to

Indians or aiding fugitive runaways.

Law and civil society worked independently of each other but converged on their endeavors for similar goals. While blood quantum cases in the Slave south primarily produced decisions that marked blackness and Indianness, similar cases in the Northwest marked whiteness in ways that demonstrated a predominance of white blood absolved and improved mixed race persons that accorded them membership in the body politic. Admixture cases actually

democracy: constitutional conventions in the Old Northwest (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 265- 312.

185 preserved the intent of racialized legal disability. Legal disability served as a benevolent stimulant for colonization designed to reconstruct the Northwest as a white republic.

Racialized legal disability sprang from the same ideological roots and had the same intended purpose as colonization: to deter free blacks from migrating into the Old Northwest, and to coerce both Native Americans and free blacks to migrate out of Ohio, Indiana, and

Illinois. Through legal disability, colonization was enacted on a broader scale and not limited solely to individual Native band removals or local county ACS auxiliaries. Native people, free blacks, abolitionists, and anticolonization allies all experienced the sting of colonizationist ideology through racialized legal disability and struggles to repeal such discriminatory laws.

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CHAPTER 6 “A REMEMDY FOR OUR PRESENT TROUBLES AND FUTURE DANGER:” ANTISLAVERY POLITICS AND COLONIZATION

Authors of the 1848 Free Soil platform, at the national convention in Buffalo, NY, proclaimed themselves as freemen, committed to freedom in order “to maintain the rights of Free

Labor against the aggressions of the Slave Power, and to secure Free Soil for a Free People.”381

The convention attendees, which included prominent men such as Charles F. Adams, Salmon

Chase, Frederick Douglas, Owen Lovejoy, and Joshua Giddings, sought to disrupt the domination of the Slave Power over the federal government in the interests of Free Democracy.

Free Soilers contended that in contrast to the expansion of slavery in early America, the original federal policy on slavery was “not to extend, nationalize or encourage, but to limit, localize and discourage, slavery.”382 They believed that the federal government had to liberate itself from all policies that supported slavery where it had the constitutional authority to do so. The national platform stood firm in its opposition to the Slave Power by asserting its policy of “no more slave states and no more slave territory.”383

Furthermore, Free Soilers insisted that, “the soil of our extensive domains be ever kept

Free, for the hardy pioneers of our own land, and the oppressed and banished of other lands, seeking homes of comfort and fields of enterprise in the new world.”384 In line with that political

381 Oliver Dyer's phonographic report of the proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N.Y. August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G. H. Derby & Co, 1848), 19. 382 Oliver Dyer's phonographic report of the proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N.Y. August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G. H. Derby & Co, 1848), 19. 383 Oliver Dyer's phonographic report of the proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N.Y. August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G. H. Derby & Co, 1848), 19. 384 Oliver Dyer's phonographic report of the proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N.Y. August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G. H. Derby & Co, 1848), 19.

187 position, the 1848 Buffalo platform advocated for a “free grant to actual settlers, in consideration of the expenses they incur in making settlements in the wilderness” and “of the public benefits resulting” from their settlement on the federal public lands as a just national policy.385

Free Soilers preference for land granted to ‘actual settlers’ and the exaltation of free labor spoke directly to a colonizationist national vision and histories of removal, dispossession, and anti-slavery ideals that opposed both slavery’s expansion and abolitionist racial egalitarianism.386

The 1848 platform invoked an imagined vision of America full of free unoccupied lands that masked the dispossession that made them free of Native residence, and free from slavery, which almost certainly meant no free black presence as well. The Free Soil platform produced at the

Buffalo Convention expressed a colonizationist vision that venerated American expansion and the quest for racial homogeneity.

Colonizationist ideology prided itself on its apparent benevolence to both white

Americans and removed free blacks and Native Americans enacted through the racial separation of relocating people of color outside the United States. Racial separation would solidify free states in the Northwest as racially homogenous spaces. This ideal resonated with citizens in the

Northwest who had petitioned for Native removal, purchased former Indian lands, traveled on canals and roads through former Indian reserves, supported bans on black immigration, and wanted no parts of slavery or legal disputes over fugitive runaways. Citizens in the Northwest had carved out a Jeffersonian vision of America that necessitated colonizationism, as both ideal

385 Oliver Dyer's phonographic report of the proceedings of the National Free Soil Convention at Buffalo, N.Y. August 9th and 10th, 1848 (Buffalo: G. H. Derby & Co, 1848), 19. 386 Jensen states that the symbolic power of the agrarian ideal influenced federal policy on land and expansion. Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 179-180. Manisha Sinha argued that abolition “questioned the enslavement of labor” and that the failure of the abolitionist vision of Reconstruction alluded to the enduring power of anti-abolitionists. Manisha Sinha, The slave's cause : a history of abolition (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016), 3-5.

188 and process, to manufacture. Now politicians like Salmon Chase, hoped to project and expand

Northwestern antislavery values as a vision for the rest of the nation in opposition to proslavery ideals.

The ideology of colonization prioritized the primary benefits of racial separation accrued for the nation first, and secondarily the benefits rendered to removed free blacks and Native

Americans. For colonizationists, the all white spaces created as a result of colonization would be beneficial for forging safe and prosperous communities and states. Republican government would thrive with a racially homogenous body politic.387 Native people and free blacks would likewise benefit from being rescued from an intractable white prejudice and delivered to designated racialized spaces for them to supposedly redeem themselves and realize their full potential.

Antislavery politics appropriated colonizationist antislavery principles, specifically ideals of free land and free labor, and offered an alternative vision of the nation in contrast to the Slave

Power, which sought to strengthen and expand slavery both domestically and throughout the western hemisphere.388 Within that alternative vision that opposed slavery, antislavery politics envisioned a nation that would create free land for free laborers that intimated American territories free of Native people and persons of African descent, whether free or enslaved. Free

387 Parkinson submitted that suspicion of blacks, Indians, and foreign mercenaries was a unifying appeal to mobilize support for the Revolutionary War. He argued that this common cause had residual influence in how elites viewed constructing citizens and a republican nation in early America. Robert G. Parkinson, The common cause : creating race and nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 654-655. Sweet elucidated how the legacy of colonial era white supremacy plays out in struggles to make multiracial body politic, in particular violence that upends that goal. John W. Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 353-397. 388 Karp’s work is immensely illuminating on the expansive vision and global threat of the Slave Power that antislavery activists desperately confronted and opposed. Matthew Karp, This vast southern empire : slaveholders at the helm of American foreign policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016).

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Soilers expressed a conventional vision of the nation that favored racial homogeneity through its principle foundations and aversion to racial equality, even if it never explicitly expressed outward antipathy for the mere presence of free blacks and Natives. The Free Soil and Free

Democratic appropriations of colonizationist ideals expressed a political framework that opposed slaveholders as a comprehensive version of white nationalism.389 By the mid-1850s, the Free

Soil movement that consisted of a coalition of former Whigs, Democrats, and Liberty men had stalled, but its core ideals would be renewed in the formation of the new Republican Party.

I argue that antislavery politics appropriated colonizationist ideology to solidify a broad coalition against the Slave Power and then employed colonization as a tool quell the wars of the

1860s and reunite the nation under a colonizationist vision for America. Free Soil as an expression of antislavery politics, sought the containment of slavery to preserve the western territories and lands within them free for white settlers moving west. As such, this vision erased

Native people’s presence in these territories and made dispossession a necessity to accomplish this imagined ideal. Political antislavery also sought to keep the territories free from slavery, and

389 Racial prejudice in the Northwest should not be dismissively cast as primarily a result of southerners migrating north across the Ohio River and bringing with them anti-black and anti-slave sentiments. As Foner noted perhaps, “the greater social mobility of western society helped make fear of the Negro more—and therefore prejudice— more severe.” Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York Oxford University Press, 1970), 279. The northwestern states were a collection of white southern migrants, white migrants from the east, and European immigrants, alongside Native people, persons of French ancestry, British, and free and freedpeople from the east and south. Simply attributing the anti-black or anti-Indian prejudice to particular subsets of northwestern migrants obscures the widespread appeal of colonization ideology. White citizens benefitted from the exclusion of slavery. Free blacks and white citizens alike benefitted from Native dispossession and removal. Racialized legal disability and dispossession coerced and subsidized anti-black and anti-Indian prejudice. The legal borders between citizens and noncitizens fostered white prejudice. This region specific version of racial nationalism was critical to reconciliation after the Civil War as well. Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: upland Southerners and the political culture of the old Northwest, 1787-1861 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1996). Bethel Saler, The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Matthew E. Stanley, The loyal west : Civil War and reunion in middle America (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2017).

190 largely free from the presence of free blacks, as slavery became the critical issue in debates over trajectory and statehood for western territories.

The 1840s and 1850s in the Old Northwest witnessed a political explosion in the confluence of anti-slavery ideology and activism with the rise and fall of several political parties.

Scholarship on the rise of antislavery politics is rich with historians both seeking to find and explicate a coherent ideology, as well as historians that argue that such coherence was fleeting at best.390 In total Whig, Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Party members in the Old Northwest rose to national prominence in opposition to the perceived power of the southern, Democratic

Party dominated, slave states.391 The breakdown of the second party system corresponded with rising sectional tensions in the 1850s. The Whig, Liberty, Free Soil, Republican, and Democratic parties all witnessed significant shifts in power and popularity in the context of party ideology on the institution of slavery.392 The racial demographic construction of America was vital to political parties’ platforms and electoral success. Political anti-slavery in the Old Northwest seamlessly dovetailed with the colonizationist principles of open land for white settlers, racial separation, and rejection of racial equality.393 Free-Soil and Republican representatives supported

390 Brooks argued that the Liberty party was the entry point for abolitionists into formal politics and it had a lasting effect on political antislavery and eventual mass emancipation through the Republican party. Frederick Blue argued that a coherence of select antislavery activists can be judged based on how they envisioned politics as the most appropriate and effective method to achieve their desired goals. Corey Brooks, Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of American politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). Frederick J. Blue, No taint of compromise : crusaders in antislavery politics (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 391 Michael F. Holt, The fate of their country : politicians, slavery extension, and the coming of the Civil War (New York : Hill and Wang, 2004). 392 See, Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery & the politics of free soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Eric Foner, Free soil, free labor, free men : the ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Michael Holt, The fate of their country : politicians, slavery extension, and the coming of the Civil War (New York : Hill and Wang, 2004). Michael Holt, The political crisis of the 1850s (New York : Norton, 1983). 393 Foner submitted that opposition to slavery combined with ideals of free labor that comprised the ability of yeoman farmers to rise economically, was central to early Republican thought. In the midst of which also involved a significant anti-black prejudice. Earle concluded that the free soil component of rising antislavery political was

191 colonization that refuted Democratic Party claims of racial equality and emboldened their support of anti-slavery that worked in the interests of white men and their right to rise. In Ohio,

Illinois, and Indiana the principles of colonizationist ideology projected as integral parts of the development Free Soil and Republican parties.394

The rise of antislavery politics reveals the evolution and incorporation of colonizationist ideology into the dominant political discourse. Antislavery politics as an expression of colonizationism, signals the necessity of incorporating Native histories in the study of antislavery, because antislavery proponents focused on land in the western territories as critical to their struggle against the spread of slavery. Antislavery politics concerned slavery’s expansion, but also involved prospects of Native lands in the west, which was the central crux of

crucial in winning supports from Democrats and their voters. Richardson appropriates and expands upon this foundation in her synthesis of the history of the Republican Party. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York Oxford University Press, 1970). Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Heather Cox Richardson, To make men free a history of the Republican Party (New York : Basic Books, 2014). Oakes contended that political antislavery from the outset had the intention of eradicating slavery permanently from the U.S. Even though he acknowledged that conditions for execution of abolition were brought on by the outbreak of the Civil War. Oakes also relegates the anti-black sentiment within political antislavery coalitions, for which Bilotta considered them as critical foundations, to a less influential position. James Oakes, Freedom national: the destruction of slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013). James Bilotta, Race and the rise of the Republican Party, 1848-1865 (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2005). 394 Historian George M. Fredrickson deemed this as part of a white nationalistic agenda that sought to make the nation racially homogenous. Berwanger and Foner offered analyses that contextualized free soil politics as being both antislavery and anti black equality. George M. Fredrickson, The Black image in the White mind: The debate on Afro-American Character and destiny, 1817-1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971). Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967). Recent monographs by Stacey Roberts and Corey Brooks investigated political abolitionism through the Liberty party. Elements of the Liberty Party later fused with Free Soil and Republican strands. However, Roberts and Brooks focus on a minority of influential political abolitionists concealed the influence anti-black Democrats and Whigs had on Free Soil politics. Charges of racial equality threatened electoral success and Free Soil politicians often espoused their racism in rhetoric and policy in accordance with public sentiment. Eric Foner, Free soil, free labor, free men: the ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Corey Brooks, Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of American politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016). Stacey Roberts, Hearts beating for liberty: women abolitionists in the old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

192 antislavery politics that mattered most to voters and potential settlers. Antislavery proponents projected a Northwestern post-removal vision of free land onto Native spaces in the west that exhibited myths about free unoccupied lands for settlers, claimed by the federal government, even as they acknowledged or ignored Native ownership of these supposedly free lands.395 The land aspect as central to antislavery politics unavoidably requires an engagement with how Free

Soil proponents envisioned the value and use of space in the western territories, and the processes by which they sought to execute their national vison.396 The western territories were not free unoccupied lands, but to make them free required the rejuvenation of dispossession through treaties and removal rhetoric of savagery and degradation in order to preserve American claims to benevolence.397 Alternatively, at other times it simply required the federal government to do nothing, disregard previous treaty stipulations, and allow squatters to take up residence on

Native lands.

The famous tagline of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men” was bound up with colonizationist ideology. Free soil applied to both the containment of slavery and the ability for land in new territories to be available for settlers moving west. However, this ideal of free

395 Jason Pierce, Making the White Man’s West: Whiteness and the creation of the American West (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016), 5-7. 396 A significant amount of antislavery scholarship still clings to preferential explorations of the political maneuverings and discourse of slavery or antislavery expansion. See Frederick J. Blue, No taint of compromise: crusaders in antislavery politics (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2005). James Oakes, The scorpion's sting : antislavery and the coming of the Civil War (New York, NY : W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). However, Earle devotes considerable attention to projected antislavery land policies in which the consensus was land grants to western settlers that buttressed the sustained drive for expansive federal homestead legislation. Jonathan H Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 59-60. 397 Christina Snyder noted that “Removal ideology excluded Indians from America’s future, claiming that they were not—and could never be—modern. Crucially, this shift redefined the nature of Indianness—away from a primarily political identity based on membership in a sovereign nation and toward a racial category associated with irredeemable savagery. By excluding Indians from modernity, the U.S. empire forged a powerful and enduring tool of dispossession.” Christina Snyder, "The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations: Indian Intellectual Culture during the Removal Era." The Journal of American History vol. 104, no. 2 (2017), 387.

193 soil necessitated the dispossession of Native people in the western territories. Free soil was not necessarily free, but required the imposition of processes akin to removal in order to remake these spaces into unoccupied free lands. Free speech and free labor referred to the right of

Americans to make antislavery petitions and forward a political discourse in opposition to slavery’s expansion that would exalt free labor as preferable to the sin and debasement of slave labor.398 In addition, practically the influx of poor, and sometimes landless, families from the

South into the Northwest demonstrated the inability of free labor to compete with slave labor. In that regard, to make Free Men out of settlers and squatters moving west required the coercion of dispossession and sometimes the violence of removal, along with the prohibitions of slavery and expressly free blacks. Making Free Men required the imposition of a colonizationist framework that dictated such freedom as possible through the expungement and prohibitions of free blacks and Natives from western spaces where white citizens sought to settle.

Antislavery compromises

The Free Soil party exhibited fusionist politics that combined politicians and ideals from several elements in the North. It coalesced as a fusion of Liberty Party members and defectors of the Whig and Democratic Party. It consisted of former Liberty men such as James G. Birney,

Barnburner Democrats such as Martin Van Buren, and former antislavery Whigs such as Joshua

Reed Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, George Washington Julian, and Charles Sumner. Forming and maintaining this political coalition required many compromises from men of different party affiliations, geographical regions, and political priorities. One of the more significant

398 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York Oxford University Press, 1970), 58-61.

194 compromises was for Liberty men who were avowed abolitionists to capitulate on their previous stance of black suffrage and racial equality.399 Antislavery political coalitions compromised on racial equality, disseminated most often by abolitionists in their critique of the progressivism of antislavery politics. In a fashion similar to colonization, abolitionists’ criticism of fusion coalitions pointed to the fundamental inegalitarian principles of political antislavery.

In its earliest days, some newspaper accounts in the Northwest linked the Free Soil Party to the old Abolition Party, which had been devoted to “total emancipation of the slave, and entire abolition of the institution of slavery” throughout the United States.400 Other press accounts on the Free Soil Party chastised its older abolitionist foundations that it characterized as hostile and uncivil which earned them a negative reputation amongst other political parties. Critics in the

Daily Sanduskian, published in Northern Ohio, took former Abolition Party members to task precisely because they formed a political coalition with their former opponents. These men had readily abandoned their principle cause of the enslaved and “sold themselves to a party, and lovingly fraternized with men who loathed them, and with whom they never had a principle in common.”401 Critics also doubted whether this new Free Soil party would find much success outside of Ohio and deemed that the nation sought not “a party devoted to no sectional interests or narrow prejudices, but to the good, the honor and safety of the whole nation.”402

George Washington Julian, born in Indiana in 1817, became a prominent Free Soil congressman, even becoming the Vice-President on the 1852 Free Soil presidential ticket. He cut his teeth as a Whig Indiana state representative in the 1840s, and staunch antislavery advocate,

399 Corey Brooks, Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of American politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 10-11. 400 “The “Free Soil” Party” The Daily Sanduskian (Sandusky, Ohio), November 11, 1848. 401 “The “Free Soil” Party” The Daily Sanduskian (Sandusky, Ohio), November 11, 1848. 402 “The “Free Soil” Party” The Daily Sanduskian (Sandusky, Ohio), November 11, 1848.

195 before being elected as an inaugural Free Soil member to the U.S. House of Representatives in

1848. In a speech in Congress in 1850, in the midst of slavery compromise debates, George

Julian argued that, “The Whigs and Democrats of the North, as well as the Free Soil men, disclaim all right on the part of Congress to touch the institution of slavery where it exists. We all agree that the subject is beyond our control.”403 Julian affirmed the right of Southern states to perpetuate slavery and the right of Northern states and free blacks to resist and defy southern man stealers. He decried the brutality of slavery and the denial of “that principle of eternal justice, a fair day's wages for a fair day's work.”404 Julian characterized abolitionists as opposed to violence and generally uninterested in fomenting insurrection as they operated on a moral ground, while he expressly separated himself from abolitionist doctrines and principles.

As a Free Soil man, Julian claimed that he stood on the principles “that Congress should abolish slavery in this District, prevent its extension beyond its present limits, refuse the admission of any more slave States,” detach any federal responsibility for slavery and leave it wholly “dependent upon State sovereignty exclusively.”405 As a Free Soiler, Julian sought the containment of slavery through denying its extension to U.S. territories and attested to Free

Soil’s political position of “non-intervention in its true sense” as “is our creed, and we proclaim it North and South.”406 He used this speech as opportunity to expound upon how, instead of coming to a gradual end, slavery had in fact “been transplanted into new regions, fostered by the

403 Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, on the slavery question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 3. 404 Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, on the slavery question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 5. 405 Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, on the slavery question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 5. 406 Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, on the slavery question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 5.

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Government as a great national interest, and interwoven with the whole fabric of its policy.”407

Julian spoke against the slaveholder rhetoric of an aggressive northern assault on slavery by expounding on northern laws that upheld the return of fugitive runaways and the discriminatory

Black Laws. Julian turned the proslavery argument of northern aggression on its head by detailing how Southern states violated the Constitution by denying free blacks from Northern states the same rights when they travel to the South. He asked rhetorically and derisively if all these Southern transgressions were also examples of northern aggression.

While prominent Free Soil men like Julian spoke in Congress, their constituents in the

Northwest sought to shore up their political coalitions and advance their agenda against slavery.

The 1850 Illinois Free Soil Convention was held in Joliet, Illinois. Owen Lovejoy, brother to the late Elijah Lovejoy, called the convention to order. By this time, Owen had become a very prominent antislavery minister and organizer. The convention’s business committee reported several resolutions that included condemning slavery as a sin and “that the right of property in man is no where guaranteed or even recognized in the Constitution.”408 They also resolved that the Slave Power was an evil that denied African Americans natural rights, repressed non- slaveholders in the South, and sought to “destroy the liberties of the Free States.”409 Attendees reaffirmed their commitment to the principles established at the Buffalo Convention in 1848.

They resolved to commit themselves to the principles of Free Democrats and to disavow affiliation with any political parties that did not denounce political alliance with the Slave Power.

In the committee’s estimation, if the general public did not vote for slaveholders and denied

407 Speech of Hon. George W. Julian, of Indiana, on the slavery question, delivered in the House of Representatives, May 14, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1850), 7. 408 “Proceedings of the Free Soil Convention held at Joliet June 5th 1850” Western Citizen, (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1850. 409 “Proceedings of the Free Soil Convention held at Joliet June 5th 1850” Western Citizen, (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1850.

197 slaveholders public office then slaveholders, and the nation, would most likely move toward general emancipation.

They also condemned the recent discussions in Congress on political compromise as an insult to freedom. They even chastised the “the treachery of Daniel Webster in deserting all his earlier profession of attachments to freedom” who had aligned himself with proslavery men on the compromise, “meets with our utter abhorrence, as indicating an obtuseness of the moral sense a depth of degradation to which we had not supposed he had descended.”410 The Illinois Free

Soil convention pledged their support to John Hale and Free Democracy in the upcoming 1852 presidential election. Hale had been recently elected as an antislavery Democrat for Senator from

New Hampshire.

In Ohio, the state’s 1851 Free Soil Convention was held in Ravenna, Ohio, where attendees likewise affirmed their support for the 1848 Buffalo platform. They cited their mission as the maintenance of “the liberties of the people, the sovereignty of the States and the integrity of the Union by the application to public affairs of the fundamental principles of equal rights, exact justice and no special privileges.”411 Moreover, they denounced the 1850 compromise as an affront to democracy for which Democrats and Whigs were both responsible. They opposed attempts to extend slavery into the West and Southwest. Conventioneers resolved to support the new Ohio Constitution, but to still struggle for universal suffrage.

Despite their rhetoric, voting records, and political achievements with electing third party candidates to Congress, Free Soilers still faced staunch opposition and critiques from

410 “Proceedings of the Free Soil Convention held at Joliet June 5th 1850” Western Citizen, (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1850. 411 “Freedom Convention at Ravenna” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 05, 1851.

198 abolitionists. Much like supporters of African colonization received criticism from abolitionists on their plans, abolitionists also sought to set the public record straight about the Free Soil Party.

An abolitionist article in the Anti-Slavery Bugle argued that the Free Soil Party was an antislavery and not an abolitionist party and that they rejected a universalist resolution at a recent state convention because the party was not committed to abolitionism. This was not news to active Free Soil men, but the Western Reserve area of Ohio had a staunch abolitionist reputation and abolitionists believed voters should know that antislavery was not akin to abolitionism.

Abolitionists contended that the Free Soil party interpreted the Constitution as a proslavery document and “that we the people, means white folks. That the slaves are not citizens. That justice was not ordained or the blessings of liberty secured to them by its adoption.”412 They reported to potential voters that voting for antislavery men who interpreted slavery as constitutional, in the expectation that they would work towards ending slavery “is hoping against hope and believing against evidence.”413 They also challenged abolitionist peers who voted for the Free Soil party, and readily compromised their abolitionist doctrine in voting for a non- abolitionist platform and endeavored “to show these anti-slavery men that they occupy no position worthy of themselves or of the cause with which they sympathise.”414 Prominent Ohioan

Salmon Chase also received criticism for his decision to ally himself with northern Democrats.

412 “An abolitionist is one who recognizes the equal right of all men to personal liberty” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), October 04, 1851. Key to political abolition was a reinterpretation of the Constitution as an antislavery document that meant that the federal government had no power to legislate or govern slavery. For abolitionists this meant that antislavery that only sought containment was not enough. The federal government had to abolish slavery in Washington DC and abdicate all federal protections for slavery. Corey Brooks, Liberty power: antislavery third parties and the transformation of American politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 16. 413 “An abolitionist is one who recognizes the equal right of all men to personal liberty” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), October 04, 1851. 414 “An abolitionist is one who recognizes the equal right of all men to personal liberty” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), October 04, 1851.

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Abolitionists continued their public rebukes of Free Soilism into the summer of 1852 and the lead up to the Presidential election. In a public reply to an article recently published in the

National Era that lauded Free Soilism as an instrument of abolitionism, an abolitionist writer contended that “abolitionism has as yet, found no organized expression.”415 Abolitionists endeavored for emancipation and had been bitterly disappointed since 1848 and the Buffalo platform that only pursued slavery’s containment. Not content with ire just for antislavery men, the writer also derided abolitionists who had supported platforms that merely hinted at emancipation. In contrast, the writer spoke of the sophistication, uncompromising, and principled stance of slaveholders who stood firm in their stance and distributed a message that those who supported political antislavery were disunionists. “Proslavery politicians know, if antislavery ones do not, that with their interpretation of the constitution, Disunion is the only direct antislavery action.”416 While the National Era was a popular antislavery paper, the writer deemed that “the Era is not the paper, nor Washington the locality, to which we should look for the origin of a policy, sufficiently bold and energetic, to overthrow the firm seated despotism of this country.”417 For abolitionists in the Northwest, compromise in any form meant a capitulation to slavery; therefore, emancipation remained the only acceptable path forward.

While abolitionists opposed Black Laws in the Northwest, they also believed the bans on slavery and protections against kidnappers in the region were indeed progressive examples for rest of the nation.

The 1852 election cycle was another crushing defeat for Free Soilism that also revealed its waning popularity as vote totals in Illinois and Ohio decreased from the 1848 election cycle.

415 “Political Anti-Slavery” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 17, 1852. 416 “Political Anti-Slavery” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 17, 1852. 417 “Political Anti-Slavery” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 17, 1852.

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However, political antislavery proponents sought to salvage some positive aspects despite the recent and somewhat expected presidential electoral defeat of the 1852 platform. Some proponents felt that the 1852 platform excelled over that of 1848 since “the Buffalo resolutions were not opposed to Slavery in the States, but merely to Slavery extension, and the usurpation of the Slave Power.”418 Still, the progress of Free Democrats and the 1852 Pittsburgh platform, which advocated slavery as sectional and freedom national, had yet to reach the moral height desired by all of its supporters. The Pittsburgh platform had rejected abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s minority report that pledged total opposition to new slave states as well as existing slave states.

One Free Soil supporter, most likely an abolitionist, wrote to the Anti-Slavery Bugle and challenged abolitionists “in the name of all that is consistent, how a true abolitionist can pledge himself against attacking slavery as it now exists, for the poor privilege of laboring politically against its extension.”419 The author also condemned Free Democrats, such as Salmon Chase, who asked abolitionists to join them politically based on their lower moral standards. He even presumed that Hale and Julian, the 1852 Free Soil Presidential ticket, were in support of the

Fugitive Slave Act as much as any other party candidates. “The Free Democratic platform is as bad as the Constitution which allows Slavery in the States” and the “Whig and Democratic

Platforms are worse that the Constitution, as they tolerate the system, not only in the States, but in some cases beyond their limits.”420 By 1853, the fusionist political coalition was broken and supporters scrambled for a method to mend the cracks and continue the fight against the Slave

Power.

418 “Free Soil—Disunion” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), December 04, 1852. 419 “Free Soil—Disunion” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), December 04, 1852. 420 “Free Soil—Disunion” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), December 04, 1852.

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At the 1854 Columbus Convention of political antislavery men, held in Ohio, the meeting’s resolutions were “confined to a single point—“resistance to the spread of slavery.”421

There were no resolutions that denounced the institution of slavery. The Bugle’s report on the convention also derided the ACS as a “great anti-slavery movement at the north, but it absorbed and misdirected sympathy and effort, and despite its good intention—instead of knocking off the shackles of the slave—by fostering prejudice, it fastened them with rivets of steel.”422 Exposing the deepening fissures within the political antislavery movement, the Bugle submitted that the compromises struck by Liberty party supporters in 1848 worked in the interests of slaveholders and that political antislavery in Ohio had fallen into the same trap.

While the Free Soil movement sought the containment of slavery, proponents willingly compromised on earlier Liberty Party and abolitionist ideals of black equality and black male suffrage in order to build a wider political coalition with voters in the North. Free Soil leaders were aware of the anti-black animus held by Americans both North and South. Forwarding an agenda that supported racial equality would forestall their ability to build a viable coalition to combat the Slave Power so they compromised and sought only the containment of slavery, to the detriment of free blacks in America. Free Soilers would learn, as abolitionists often contended, that acquiescence to Fugitive slave laws and compromises were inefficient and ineffective.

Salmon Chase and fusion politics

421 “The Columbus Convention” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 22, 1854. 422 “The Columbus Convention” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), July 22, 1854.

202

Salmon P. Chase was a key architect in bringing about the political coalition of antislavery men in the North to form the Free Soil Party in 1848. Chase was born in New

Hampshire in 1808. He moved back to Ohio, settled into Cincinnati in 1830, and began his law practice, which progressed rapidly and required a junior partner by 1835.423 Chase, an early abolitionist, represented fugitive runaways, as well as their white protectors in Ohio courts. Prior to joining the Free Soil Movement Chase was a member of the Liberty Party where he developed a zeal for antislavery politics. As an architect of fusion politics Chase was emblematic of the compromise on racial equality to forge a larger political coalition against the Slave Power.

Chase had been severely disappointed with the 1844 presidential election and James

Birney’s poor showing as the Liberty Party candidate. As a result, he became determined to forge a broader coalition of antislavery persons that could garner higher vote totals amongst citizens in the North. The coalition’s convention gathered in August of 1848 in Buffalo, NY to hammer out a platform and nominate its presidential candidate.424

The Buffalo platform, for which Chase was the prime author, spoke to issues of trade, infrastructure, and federal land policies. Most notably, the Buffalo platform sought the containment of slavery and to stop its spread into the western territories. In constructing the Free

Soil platform, Chase quite purposefully sidestepped the issue of black male suffrage and the

Black Laws. As Frederick Blue noted, Chase “permitted the Free-Soilers to become the first antislavery party which evaded the issue of black equality.”425 This abnegation of black equality

423 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 14-21. 424 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 61-63. 425 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 64.

203 was key to securing a broad appeal and building a coalition against the Slave Power, which held a significant influence over both the national Whig and Democrat parties.

The 1848 Free Soil platform nominated Democrat and former president Martin Van

Buren, along with Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, to serve as Vice

President. Free Soilers had a dismal showing in the presidential election but were successful in winning several seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Chase, exploiting his connections, maneuvered himself into being elected Senator from Ohio by the Ohio General Assembly in

1848. In the midst Senate debates over Henry Clay’s 1850 compromise bill Chase supported voluntary black colonization and racial separation. He even supported a proposed 1853 bill to appropriate federal funds for African colonization.426

As a result of the 1848 defeat, Salmon Chase embarked on a quest to merge the Free Soil and Democratic parties in the North, while also being firmly committed to his antislavery principles. Chase expressed his hopes that Democrats throughout the nation would “be content to leave slavery and the extradition of slaves to the several States” and “thus severing the national government from all connections” with slavery.427 However, Chase lamented that it was not immediately feasible and instead recommended “cordial toleration, in Congress and out of

Congress” leaving people free to discuss their views and have their elected officials forward their opinions.428

In efforts to forge this political alliance, Chase solicited support and communicated far and wide with antislavery politicians. In an 1851 letter written to Joshua Giddings, Chase

426 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 84. 427 “Houston and the Democracy” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), September 6, 1851. 428 “Houston and the Democracy” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), September 6, 1851.

204 speaking on his attempts to merge Free Soilism with northern Democrats, communicated that “I shall serve the great cause of Truth and Progress as efficiently in the democratic organization as

I did in the Liberty or Freesoil Ranks.”429 Chase wanted to push back on criticism heaped upon him by fellow antislavery proponents and abolitionists displeased with his attempts to merge with Democrats specifically. Chase bemoaned that this his efforts to rebrand Free Soil as Free

Democracy denoted a missed opportunity to present it to voters as an authentic expression and

“devotion to democratic principles.”430 In Chase’s estimation, without this merger and rebranding free soilism “composed of men of opposite political view on the questions which divide conservatives from progressives” would be “held together only by a common sentiment of hostility to slavery.”431 Chase sought to learn from previous political coalition failures and capitalize on the contemporary antislavery momentum created by the 1850 Compromise measure to forge a broader coalition that could legitimately oppose the Slave Power and compel significant numbers of voters to support them. According to Chase, the only pathway to carry that momentum forward was to rebrand in specific terms of democracy and take up all of the principles of the Old Line Democrats except slavery.

Abolitionists and former peers of Chase’s were displeased with his political endeavors.

They used the public press to criticize Salmon Chase, a previously avowed abolitionist, who had chosen to eschew the Free Soil Party and align himself with the Democratic Party. Of course,

Chase had maintained some supporters who praised him for seeking to maintain his antislavery principles in his alliance with the Democrats. However, abolitionists writing in the Anti-Slavery

Bugle argued that “to us it seems evident he has abandoned his principles to gratify his

429 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 333. 430 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 333. 431 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 333.

205 democratic preferences.”432 Abolitionists ridiculed Chase and his shift from the Liberty Party platform, for which he was also a central architect, and his previous support for Martin Van

Buren and the Buffalo platform of 1848, “to the one the Ohio democrats had in 1848, from which they hoped to boost Gen. Cass to the presidency, and represents it as the true anti-slavery platform.”433 Antislavery free soil supporters in Cincinnati also rebuked Chase and his political change and denounced him as their Senator.

Chase did not contribute to the 1852 Free Soil platform and took issue that Pittsburgh platform did not vote to carry over a position of nonintervention on slavery in the South that his

1848 Buffalo Platform explicitly stipulated. Most likely Chase supported nonintervention in keeping with his political antislavery views, and also not wanting to take the chance of turning away potential voters for the antislavery Free Soil platform.434 Chase registered his support for the 1852 platform but asserted that his position was to remain “an Independent Democrat, just as

I have heretofore done, acting with the Pittsburgh organization now because it is more democratic than the Old Line.”435 Chase described himself as a Democrat and supported the

Pittsburgh platform because he deemed its antislavery stance as more in line with traditional democratic principles than the national Democratic Party itself. In the 1852 presidential election, the Free Soil ticket garnered over thirty-one thousand votes in Ohio, three thousand in Indiana, and ten thousand in Illinois. Their vote totals were up nationally from 1848, but down in both

Ohio and Illinois in 1852.

432 “Mr. Chase” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), September 20, 1851. 433 “Mr. Chase” The Anti-Slavery Bugle (New-Lisbon, Ohio), September 20, 1851. 434 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 348. 435 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 349.

206

Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act presented a renewed opportunity to forge antislavery political alliances and Chase sought to take full advantage. In a December 1854 letter to John Paul, Chase argued that opposition to slavery was “a simple application of Democratic

Principle” and that that was his singular political motive.436 As such, he could not align himself with any political party that did not also share this primary position nor one that he felt was

“Anti-Democratic in its character.”437 This critical principle for Chase’s politics even allowed him to support Know Nothing party members for Ohio congressional seats because they also opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

At the outset of the organization of the Republican Party in 1855, Chase doubted it would have the ability to last as he deemed it “nothing but the Freesoil Party with accessions.”438 He even denigrated the name, again believing the title “Democracy” was critical in broad base coalition building and wanted to continue to push the momentum forward for 1856 and 1860.

In his early ruminations about the 1856 presidential election Chase figured that the best political antislavery effort would be “by making the simple issue of Slavery or Freedom.”439

Naturally, he pitched himself as the best candidate to take advantage of nonpartisan antislavery sentiment in the North and make a credible run for President in 1856. After serving just one term in the Senate, Chase became governor of Ohio in 1856. Later that fall Chase, who owed much of his personal political success to taking advantage of the coalitions he helped build, would be disappointed that the he did not receive the new Republican Party’s presidential nomination.440

436 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 392. 437 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 392. 438 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 405. 439 John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase papers (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1993), 429. 440 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 112-115.

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Antislavery Free Soilism in the Old Northwest struggled as Democrats remained powerful despite the fall of the Whig party. The temporarily powerful Know Nothing party required compromises on nativism to maintain antislavery political power. These difficulties forced antislavery political supporters into making compromises and seeking coalition more intentionally. Chase, who was an early abolitionist, Liberty Party member, and architect of the

Free Soil platform sought most often to align his public politics of antislavery, which abdicated his personal abolitionist sensibilities, with the Democrats in the North. He consistently, until the birth of the Republican Party, expressly called his coalition movement Free Democracy and Free

Democrats. No doubt that Chase was a political man, but he also exemplified antislavery politics that developed broad appeals through compromises on racial equality that abolitionists often critiqued in a manner similar to their critiques of colonizationism.

Expansion and public lands

As Free Soilers looked to forge an antislavery coalition to combat the Slave Power, they had their sights set on the western territories as the place for free labor and settlers to expand.

This placed public and potentially public lands, as central to their policy platforms. Land policies, squatters, and settler expansion was inextricably linked to Native dispossession and removal, but serviced the interests and prosperity of the general public.441

The 1830 Preemption Act granted future squatters the right to purchase the public lands that they had taken up residence on illegally.442 It also retroactively granted the same rights to

441 Bethel Saler, The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 231-235. 442 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172.

208 older squatters. Some federal officials objected to the selective nature of the legislation and the different entitlements it delegated to some citizens and not to others.443 In debates over the bill, several Senators had registered objections to the ability for immigrants and nonwhites to take part in the potential land legislation.444 The preemption law of 1830 exhibited a revolution for squatters’ rights. Henry Clay himself thought ill of squatters in the west and primarily opposed preemption laws that gave the right of settlement to squatters because he thought their natural character as “intruders, trespassers, and bullies” would threaten, “to undercut the middle-class concept of republican community embedded in the American System.”445

A partisan divide on the public lands developed between the Whigs and the Democrats.

Whigs viewed public lands in the west as products to aid national economic progress, while

Democrats viewed it as a resource for individual progress free from federal constraints.446

Despite these differences, both parties championed the archetype of a white male head of household, settler family to ensure unity within both Democrat and Whig parties.447

The Preemption Act of 1841 expanded on the foundation laid out in 1830, converted illegal squatters into legal residents by creating a pathway to purchase federal lands at the low price $1.25 per acre, all before these federal lands became available to the wider public for purchase. Squatters could purchase the lands they resided on with money and under the

443 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 173-175. 444 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 175-176. 445 John R. Van Atta, “A Lawless Rabble”: Henry Clay and the Cultural Politics of Squatters’ Rights, 1832–1841 Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 28, No. 3, (Fall 2008), 176. 446 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177. 447 Jensen noted that intraparty unity required dismissal of discourse on women’s and black citizenship “while Native Americans merited notice only when they figured as a savage impediment to settlement by virtuous white male farmers.” Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 178.

209 stipulations that they were citizens, who had lived on said lands for at least one year and made improvements to the land. Northwestern and western states also had incentive to see that squatters purchased these lands as the legislation guaranteed to state treasuries ten percent of land sale proceeds.448 In line with preemption rights, homestead bills gained widespread support throughout the North in the 1840s. By the time of the completion of the Buffalo Platform in

1848, the Free Soil Party’s stance on the public lands was widely popular in the North but faced slaveholder opposition in the South. Tennessee congressman Andrew Johnson even proposed his own homestead bill in 1849.449 In the 1850s, the House of Representatives passed homestead legislation three times and each time it was blocked by the Southern dominated Senate.450 A coalition of eastern speculators and southern slave-owners stymied homestead bills throughout

1850s.451

The 1850 Free Democrat Party platform, born in the Old Northwest, opposed new compromises over slavery and the further proliferation of slave states or slave territories. The

Platform also recognized that slavery should be a local institution governed by state law, for which Congress had no power to establish or regulate, and advocated “government must return to the policy of 1787, when it was the fixed determination of the nation to limit, localize, and discourage slavery.”452 Free Democrats also specifically supported a “free grant to actual settlers,

448 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 176. 449 Hannah L. Anderson, “That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 186” History Teacher, Vol.45 No. 1, (2011), 118. 450 Hannah L. Anderson, “That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 186” History Teacher, Vol.45 No. 1, (2011), 119. 451 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200. 452 “Platform of the Free Democrat Party” Western Citizen (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1850.

210 in consideration of the expenses incurred in making settlements in the wilderness,” that promoted the best interests of the nation.453

Portions of the public lands had been used to make bounty land payments to military veterans since the War of 1812. In 1850, Congress passed the bounty land law that provided land, which assumed an average bounty of eighty acres, “to all persons living and to the widows and minor children” veterans who had served in any war between 1790 and the Mexican

American War.454 To be eligible for bounty land payments veterans had to have served at least one month and land grants increased based upon the length of time served. The Department of

Interior estimated the number of eligible soldiers to be about 550,000 that totaled around forty- four million acres owed to current and former soldiers. By 1851, the Pension Office was receiving over 400 claims per day. However, several thousand claims were reviewed and rejected on account of fraud.

At the same time, Interior Secretary, and native Virginian, Alexander Stuart reported that

Indians who still resided in parts of the Old Northwest had acquired the customs of their white neighbors and were living peaceably in vicinity to them. Local bands “have thus acquired the goodwill of their neighbors” some of whom wrote petitions on their behalf in opposition to the threat of their removal.455 The Department of Interior was a new institution in the 1850s having been just received approval for its creation in 1849. It was charged with supervising the General

Land Office, federal pensions, marshals, other federal officers, and Indian Affairs. Stuart believed that “humanity and sound policy alike require a compliance with the wishes of the

453 “Platform of the Free Democrat Party” Western Citizen (Chicago, IL), June 11, 1850. 454 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 496. 455 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 502.

211 petitioners” that their Indian peers, who had already survived multiple waves of removal, should not be deported.456

Stuart advocated for a national change in Indian policy in the west, given that removal had pushed Indians from the east, west into competition with other Indian nations and American expansion into California, Oregon, and Utah had resulted in an encroachment on Indian bands from white settlers on all sides that fomented a danger on the frontier. Stuart determined that the

“policy of removal, except under peculiar circumstances, must necessarily be abandoned; and the only alternatives left are to civilize or exterminate them.”457 Stuart advocated for policies that sought a “revolution in the Indian character and destiny” that would be “commenced by substituting kindness for coercion; by feeding and clothing them” instead of violent conflict and land dispossession.458 Stuart’s recommendations mirrored earlier turn of the century civilizationist policies that preceded removal doctrines. Stuart sought to make Native people

“understand the value of property and the benefits of its separate ownership,” along with teaching them agriculture and attendance at manual labor schools.459 Through this plan, Stuart believed Indians could be properly prepared for “the day when they may be elevated to the dignity of American citizenship.”460

The 1852 Pittsburgh Free Soil platform pledged that the federal government “should at once proceed to relieve itself from all responsibility for the existence of slavery, wherever it possesses constitutional power to legislate for its extinction.”461 Free Soilers drew a line that

456 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 502. 457 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 502. 458 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 503. 459 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 503. 460 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1851), 503. 461 The Three national platforms, 1852.

212 explicitly contended against the expansion and nationalization of slavery. Free Soil supporters advocated for the separation between slavery and the federal government believing “that slavery is sectional and freedom national” so that the Constitution advocated for general freedom.462 In particular, Free Soilers also pledged that “all men have a natural right to a portion of the soil” and that in contrast to land accrual by wealthy land speculators and businesses, federal land should be used “for the benefit of the people, and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers.”463 In this sense, the Free Soil platform advocated for the expansion of settler families that customarily and historically required Native dispossession and removal for settlers to establish homes on unoccupied lands. Free Soilers even advocated for European immigrants “becoming citizens and owners of the soil among us” as a rebuke to rising nativist sentiments. The 1852 Free Soil platform pledged its opposition to corrupt Whig and Democratic parties that allied with the Slave Power. Instead, “the purpose of the Free Democracy is, to take possession of the Federal Government and administer it for the better protection of the rights and interests of the whole people.”464 In line with Free Soil ideals, public land policies in the late

1840s and 1850s began to move away from priorities of economic revenue toward providing for the general welfare of the people.465

Kansas-Nebraska and antislavery expansion

In the 1850s, the General Land Office’s primary goal was “to protect, and at the same time promote, as far as practicable, the interests of the actual bona fide settler,” as opposed to

462 The Three national platforms, 1852. 463 The Three national platforms, 1852. 464 The Three national platforms, 1852. 465 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 190.

213 elite land speculators.466 Interior Secretary Robert McClelland sought to restrict the ability of federally employed land surveyors and sales agents from purchasing lands they had personally surveyed. In 1854, a federally appointed board of commissioners was still at work overseeing titles and land grants in Indiana. Native removal, land cessions, and public land sales bore fruit well into the 1850s in the Northwest even as the Free Soil movement was primarily concerned with the western territories. McClelland envisioned himself as a trustee for Native Americans responsible for overseeing the disbursement or withholding annuities and investing them for

Native nations’ benefit. At times, the commissioners of the General Land Office and Indian

Affairs worked together to settle land or treaty disputes levied by Native people.467

Public lands remained vital to antislavery politics. Settler expansion, antislavery, and compromises on racial equality all came together in the disputes over Kansas-Nebraska. The

Kansas-Nebraska controversy over slavery’s extension that arose in 1850s presented an old problem for Native people in the territories. For starters, several of the Native bands, such as

Potawatomi, Shawnee, and Wyandot had been previously removed from Ohio and Indiana in the

1830s and 1840s. Now, less than twenty years after their forced emigration, they once again faced the tide of white encroachment onto lands that had been guaranteed to them in perpetuity by previously negotiated treaties.468

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska act was engineered to officially organize Nebraska as a Territory, in part to further his personal financial interests in railroad expansion. In a capitulation to slaveholder interests in the Senate, he agreed to stipulate that

466 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1855), 121. 467 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1855), 134. 468 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183-184.

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Kansas Territory would be organized without an outright ban on slavery.469 This would nullify the 1820 Missouri Compromise that set a northern longitudinal boundary to slavery’s expansion.

Northerners viewed this as an assault on the principle of free labor that “would force free workers into, at best, a quasi-slavery of their own.”470 The majority of white settlers already present in Kansas Territory at the time expressed antislavery principles.

A coalition of northern Democrats in Congress, led prominently by Salmon Chase, but also joined by Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and Charles Sumner, collectively espoused the principles of Free Democracy. In 1854 Chase was the main author of the Appeal of the

Independent Democrats that took issue with Douglas’s proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act. Chase used the Passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act as an opportunity for renewed vigor in forming an antislavery coalition, especially since the Whig party had developed new sectional cleavages with the passage of Douglas’s bill.471 They opposed the preliminary congressional discussions on the extension of slavery into Nebraska “as a criminal betrayal of precious rights” and a vile plot by slaveholders to “exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”472

These Independent Democrats argued that the spread of slavery to this region would repress its development and “inducements to the immigration of free laborers will be almost

469 Heather Cox Richardson, “Abraham Lincoln and the politics of principle” Marquette Law Review (v. 93 no. 4, 2010), 1385. 470 Heather Cox Richardson, “Abraham Lincoln and the politics of principle” Marquette Law Review (v. 93 no. 4, 2010), 1385. 471 Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase : a life in politics (Kent, Ohio : Kent State University Press, 1987), 96. 472 Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the people of the United States: shall slavery be permitted in Nebraska? (Washington, D.C.: Towers Printers, 1854), 1.

215 destroyed.”473 Free Democrats envisioned the migration of free men into the territory to speed its development and exploit its resources for both private and public profit. They feared that slavery, should it be implemented in Nebraska, would restrict European immigrants and northern migrants from settling on these lands. Slavery’s expansion would be a detriment to both free men and free labor. They believed free men could not labor beside the enslaved and “labor cannot be respected where any class of laborers is held in abject bondage.”474 They even requested that newspapers printed in languages other than English make special effort to make their readers aware of this potential legislation. According to these self-proclaimed Democrats, slavery in

Nebraska would result in a national expansion of slavery and a containment on freedom that would “permanently subjugate the whole country to the yoke of a slaveholding despotism.”475

The passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively nullified both the Missouri compromise and the 1834 Indian Intercourse Act. However, Southerners viewed accompanying homestead proposals “as an essentially abolitionist measure, equating a universal policy of free land with free soil.”476 Federal debates over homestead legislation in the 1850s generally revolved around who should be regarded as citizens and thus entitled to partake in the advantages of Homestead legislation. In that vein the debates over the proposed 1854 homestead

473 Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the people of the United States : shall slavery be permitted in Nebraska? (Washington, D.C.: Towers Printers, 1854), 6. 474 Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the people of the United States : shall slavery be permitted in Nebraska? (Washington, D.C.: Towers Printers, 1854), 6. 475 Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress, to the people of the United States : shall slavery be permitted in Nebraska? (Washington, D.C.: Towers Printers, 1854), 7. 476 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 200-201.

216 legislation specifically excluded free blacks from the ability to participate on account that a citizen was definitively white and white only.477

Senator Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act employed free sovereignty for territorial citizens to decide whether or not to legalize slavery in conjunction with application for statehood. As a result, thousands of Missouri citizens flooded into Kansas Territory, matched by

New England emigrants, both of whom now took up residence on Indian lands.478 By the time that Kansas Territory was officially opened to settlement by white citizens in May of 1854, no land had yet been ceded by Native bands in the territory.479

Most white immigrants to Kansas Territory believed that slavery should be outlawed.

However, only immigrants from New England opposed slavery as a moral cause. Immigrants from Upper South border slave states and the Old Northwest were indifferent on the immorality of slavery but intent on banning slavery as an opportunity to also prevent the migration and residence of free blacks into the territories.480 White settlers from the Old Northwest represented the most significant number of antislavery persons in Kansas Territory. In total about 30,000 settlers had emigrated from Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by 1860.481 Another 150,000 had settled into Iowa in the same timeframe.

477 Laura Jensen, Patriots, settlers, and the origins of American social policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197-199. 478 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 185. 479 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 99. 480 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 97-98. 481 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 100.

217

Intrusions on Delaware land in Kansas Territory had given them pause in trusting

American discourse on land policy and residency. The Shawnees and Wyandot in Kansas

Territory had agreed by treaty to break up their lands in allotment and terminate their annual annuities in 1854. Indian Affairs Commissioner George Manypenny attested that due to these treaty stipulations “they will soon no longer be known as an Indian tribe.”482 The 1854 treaties with Indians in Kansas Territory stipulated for large annuities to be paid to Native nations but also for lands to be broken up into individual ownership. Manypenny affirmed that as settlers spread west and surrounded Native nations that those who had treaties with the United States for reservations would be protected from squatter trespasses until “the land to which the Indian title is extinguished.”483 In Manypenny’s estimation, this would protect both settlers and Indians and quell hostilities on the frontier.

In reality, both the Delaware and the Wyandot received little to no protection from federal officials in the late 1850s against the illegal trespasses of squatters on their respective land reserves. The Delaware had ceded approximately one million acres of land in Kansas in their 1854 treaty. The proceeds from land sales were to be transferred to the Delaware for them to use in any manner they saw fit.484

Interior Secretary Robert McClelland reported on treaties that had been made with various Indian nations in 1854, including Miamis, Delawares, and Shawnees who had previously moved west of the Mississippi River. McClelland opined that these treaties would be beneficial to Native bands but feared that “Indians may be brought into too close contact with the whites,

482 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 5. 483 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 18. 484 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 185.

218 which generally degrades them, because they seem inclined to contract their evil habits, instead of imitating their virtues.”485 McClelland appropriated older myths about Indian degradation and white settler contact. He went further to advocate for treaty annuities to be used in “the improvement of their moral condition” and used to educate Indians. McClelland parroted Isaac

McCoy’s beliefs in lauding the productive nature Christian conversion had on Native people.

Treaties ratified in 1854 provided for the survey and sale of Indian lands ceded to the

U.S. in Kansas territory. The net profits of the land sales would be paid out to Native nations.

President Pierce held the authority to commence surveys and public land sales of these ceded lands and McClelland believed that land sales would begin in the early part of 1855. He also spoke of the decency and class of Native people who were “incessantly pressed by the whites, who, under the plea of necessity exercise their superior sagacity in devices, to invade their rights and despoil them of their property.”486 McClelland recounted that previously “it was considered that a mixed occupancy of the same territory by the white and red man was incompatible with the safety and happiness of either” which resulted in the policy of removal and a guarantee that western lands would be the exclusive domain of Native Americans.487 He lamented that “this guaranty has not been fulfilled” and the frontier hostilities between white settlers and Native people that removal was proposed to remedy, still persisted.488

As Indians and their agents continued to solicit federal assistance, federal officials did not respond to the Delaware, nor to their agents, in requests for protection from squatters. Even

Kansas Territorial Governor Andrew Reeder sought to profit from speculation for new towns

485 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1854), 40. 486 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1855), 137. 487 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1855), 137. 488 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1855), 137.

219 illegally erected on Indian lands.489 The Wyandot in Kansas territory, who were expelled from

Ohio in 1843, signed an 1855 treaty that formerly dissolved their band and broke up tribal lands into individual allotments and requested American citizenship with the hope of maintaining residence in Kansas territory.490 The Delaware also opted for allotment once it became clear that they would not receive protection or assistance in defending their lands against white squatters.491

The Wyandot and Shawnee bands in Kansas Territory were dissolved according an 1855 treaty and designated as United States citizens. However, the process was not indiscriminate as

Indian Commissioner Manypenny presumed that some Native persons “will necessarily have to pass through a state of pupilage” in order to become citizens.492 Potawatomi bands in Kansas

Territory had recurring squabbles with white settlers that emboldened at least one chief and his band to migrate with the plan to move south to Creek or Cherokee lands. Even the local St

Mary’s Indian agent was subject to violence perpetrated by white settlers who assaulted him and stole agricultural tools in his possession that were intended for Indians under his agency.

Manypenny in his 1855 official report railed against the Potawatomi leaders in Kansas

Territory, whom he felt were “reckless and dishonest men.”493 Indians whom had been removed or emigrated to Kansas Territory had done so under the stipulation that new lands in Kansas would be theirs in perpetuity and they would be shielded from further intrusions and trespasses

489 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193. 490 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183-184. 491 John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2007), 183-184. 492 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857), 10. 493 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 6.

220 that they had experienced back east. However, by 1855 these new lands in Kansas territory had also become places where squatters trespassed and made improvements on what was legally recognized as Indian lands, in large part due to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Indian agents for

Native people in Kansas were instructed to remove squatters however, squatters generally

“disregarded the admonitions and warnings of the officers of the Indian service,” and necessitated that the military be called upon at a near, but as yet, unspecified future date to forcefully expel squatters.494 Manypenny contended that as settlers flowed into the region and strife over slavery rose between proslavery and antislavery settlers, “the hostile factions seem to have no sympathy for the red man; but, on the contrary, many of both sides appear to disregard his interests and trespass upon his rights with impunity.”495 Manypenny expressed disdain that this course of action in ejecting squatters as distasteful, but still necessary on behalf of the United

States to fulfill its treaty obligations. He hoped this would instill trust from Indians in his office, the federal government, and its established treaties. Especially since illegal squatters disrupted the ability for the federal government to survey and prepare these lands for sale, with proceeds going to Native nations, in full completion of 1854 treaty stipulations.

White emigrants from the Old Northwest and border slave states took issue with New

England emigrants who advocated for racial equality. For settlers from border slave states and the Northwest they opposed slavery’s extension as a method to prevent the growth of a black population, free or enslaved, and as Eugene Berwanger put it, this “large group of settlers was more anti-Negro than antislavery.”496

494 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 8. 495 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1855 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1856), 8. 496 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 101.

221

The initial Free State movement in Kansas got off to a rocky start because New England migrants opposed excluding free blacks while other settlers stipulated that black exclusion was necessary in Kansas Territory. The movement garnered little support from Northwestern settlers until James H. Lane became a prominent advocate within the Free State movement after his arrival to Kansas in the summer of 1855. James Lane was born in Indiana in 1814. He served as a Lt. Governor of Indiana and as a Democratic congressman before moving to Kansas Territory.

Lane helped to forge a coalition of New Englanders, border slave state settlers, and settlers from the Old Northwest in opposition to the recently elected proslavery Kansas legislature which the free state movement regarded as illegitimate. Lane brought about this coalition by proposing a referendum vote on free black exclusion that was acceptable to Charles Robinson who served as the Free State movement’s leader and agent for the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Most likely Lane knew that the demographics of Kansas Territory would lead to a victory of the referendum when put to a vote since most settlers had migrated from the Old Northwest and demanded a black exclusion law in order to support Robinson’s push for antislavery statehood.497

The Free State movement held the first meeting of the Topeka Constitutional Convention in October 1855. The convention approved the antislavery constitution and was adjourned in

December 1855. That same month James Lane, who had served as the Topeka convention’s president, brought forth the free black exclusion referendum, which was also approved by a three to one margin.498 Historian Eugene Berwanger argued that the victory of the black exclusion clause entailed that “whichever section they had previously lived, the midwestern concept of

497 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 105. 498 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 111-112.

222 society held no place for free Negroes.”499 The next year James Lane, along with territorial governor Andrew Reeder, were elected as U.S. Senators by the state legislature in 1856, while still in the process of applying for statehood.500

In a lengthy part of his 1856 report, Manypenny commented on the situation for Native people in Kansas Territory stating that, “In the din and strife between the antislavery and proslavery parties with reference to the condition of the African race there, and in which the rights and interests of the red man have been completely overlooked and disregarded.”501 While antislavery and proslavery factions warred over slavery and politics, Native bands felt the repercussions of this battle over purportedly unoccupied lands from both sides.

By 1856, lands formerly owned by Indians in Kansas Territory were being prepared for sale with the proceeds earmarked for Native people to pay for their removal to Indian Territory to the south. The Delaware for example had ceded lands for this very purpose and had been assured of a positive outcome since their Indian agent was required to be present and insure their best interests during the process of land sales.

Some of these treaties had authorized the “re-acquisition of lands granted to Indian tribes by former treaties” that in total accumulated to more than 174 million acres of land. In that time the Office of Indian Affairs had expanded to twenty-two new agencies and sub-agencies to oversee the additional two thousand square miles of territory newly under its jurisdiction. As

499 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 112. 500 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 115. 501 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857), 21.

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Manypenny stated in his 1856 annual report, “In no former equal period of our history have so many treaties been made, or such vast accessions of land been obtained.”502

McClelland proclaimed that treaties’ purpose had “been do ample justice to the Indians, and leave no room for the complaint,” even as he acknowledged that often times the statements and agreements during treaty councils were changed in the ratified treaties that created a disconnect between what Indians had negotiated for and what treaties actually stated.503 In a call for more legislation to defend Native persons and their property in American territories

Manypenny lamented his bureau’s current inability to effectively discharge its duties. He attested that Native bands in Kansas who had been subjected to prior removals in the east, should be protected in their homes and lands that were guaranteed to them. Pushing back against the perpetual reconstructions of Indians as a people out of time and relegated to past perceptions of their character Manypenny argued, “with reference to his true character, erroneous opinions very generally prevail. He is, indeed, the victim of prejudice. He is only regarded as the irreclaimable, terrible savage.”504

By 1858, with the proslavery elements all but defeated in Kansas Territory, the push for black exclusion subsided, even from former proponent James Lane.505 Black exclusion in the region became an issue again in 1859 as Republicans proposed bans on free blacks in Nebraska to contest pro black charges levied by local Democrats. By the time that Kansas was finally admitted as a state in January 1861 no black exclusion laws were on the books.506 For settlers in

502 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857), 20 503 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1856), 185. 504 Annual Report for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1856 (Washington, DC: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1857), 22. 505 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 115. 506 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 120.

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Kansas and Nebraska they reasoned that slavery was responsible for producing a free black population and once slavery was no longer a possibility their impetus for black exclusion laws subsided.507

Free Soil politics presumed either the lack of an Indian presence in Kansas and Nebraska or the lack of significant Indian opposition to antislavery expansion in these territories. The

Kansas-Nebraska controversy exhibited racial nationalist proclivities of antislavery politics as settlers usurped Indian lands and sought to prohibit slavery and free blacks from migrating into the territories.

Colonization renewed in the 1860s

Colonization was revitalized in the 1860s as belief in its fictions of benevolence trapped federal policy in pursuit of programs that privileged the benefits to accrue to white citizens even as supporters proclaimed it was for the benefit of Native people and free blacks.

In October 1860, James Mitchell, agent and Secretary of the Indiana State Board of

Colonization wrote a private letter that he addressed to John Breckenridge, John Bell, Stephen

Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln. Mitchell did not intend for the communication to be widely circulated, but wrote to each candidate in the fast approaching 1860 Presidential election “as an aid to reflection on the most dangerous and troublesome question of our time,” in the hopes “that steps will be taken to dispose of it before it become of unmanageable magnitude.”508 Mitchell sought to advocate for colonization as a method to quell sectional tensions over slavery that had

507 Eugene Berwanger, The frontier against slavery: Western anti-Negro prejudice and the slavery extension controversy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 118-122. 508 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Springfield, IL: Steam Press of Bailhache & Baker, 1860), 3.

225 already prompted the split of the Democratic Party. In keeping with colonizationist ideology,

Mitchell believed that federal support for African colonization could prevent further political and physical hostilities over slavery wishing that colonizationist fears over “the future of this country may prove incorrect, and never receive a fulfillment.”509 He looked to cover all possible outcomes by soliciting the help of each candidate and along with the letter, attached pamphlets and private correspondence between himself and previous presidents and cabinet members to attest to African colonization’s distinguished history and promise.

Most notably, Mitchell attached a document entitled, The Separation of the Races Just and Politic, which was previously written by the Indiana State Board of Colonization for its official 1852 report to the Indiana General Assembly. In its vindication and promotion of free black removal, Indiana colonizationists argued that the role of government was to promote the peace and prosperity of its citizens and to accomplish that goal “a homogenous population is necessary to the existence of a sound republic.”510 Advocates for African colonization argued further that “a heterogeneous population, that will not amalgamate, sooner or later becomes a turbulent” mass of people for which the “separation of the races, and the erection of the colored race into an independent and separate commonwealth are the true and only remedies for the disabilities of the colored race.”511 Colonizationists surmised that republican societies were only possible with racially homogenous populations and thus free blacks had no way of becoming equals in American society. While initially authored in 1852, Mitchell believed that African colonization was perhaps more important than ever to the nation and he sought to convey that

509 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Springfield, IL: Steam Press of Bailhache & Baker, 1860), 3. 510 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Springfield, IL: Steam Press of Bailhache & Baker, 1860), 12-21. 511 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Springfield, IL: Steam Press of Bailhache & Baker, 1860), 12-21.

226 message to all four presidential candidates in the fall of 1860. The very fact that he addressed his message to each candidate alludes to his reasoning that no matter their position on slavery each candidate would be receptive to the idea that removing free blacks from the nation as a positive step toward unifying sectional factions.

At the cusp of the 1860 presidential election, the African colonization movement was reinvigorated as a progressive tool to prevent sectional violence over slavery and unite the nation. Once again, colonization’s self-proclaimed benevolence played a large factor in its renewed appeal as a productive good for the nation through the deportation of free blacks, as a middle ground of compromise for antislavery and proslavery proponents.

The 1860s was a violent period for the United States as wars over slavery and continental expansion engulfed the East, South, and West.512 The Confederacy’s move to fight for independence to preserve slavery served as the culmination of decades of military and political maneuvers to entrench slavery throughout the western hemisphere.513 In reaction, Lincoln and the Republicans moved to fortify an antislavery foundation by passing the Homestead Act,

Morrill Act, and swiftly moving to incorporate western territories and build necessary infrastructure. The 1862 Homestead Act, signed into law by President Lincoln, gave any male citizen age twenty one and above up to 160 acres of land, that required land improvements, at the price of $1.25 per acre.514 The Homestead legislation intended to prevent speculators from hoarding land and stymie the growth of concentrated wealth in the interests of promoting the free

512 Douglas R. Egerton, The wars of Reconstruction : the brief, violent history of America's most progressive era (New York, NY : Bloomsbury, 2014). Steven Hahn, A nation without borders : the United States and its world in an age of civil wars, 1830-1910 (New York : Viking press, 2016). 513 Matthew Karp, This vast southern empire : slaveholders at the helm of American foreign policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016), 50-69. 514 Hannah L. Anderson, “That Settles It: The Debate and Consequences of the Homestead Act of 186” History Teacher, Vol.45 no. 1, (2011), 119-120.

227 labor ideal.515 The colonial nature of western expansion provoked the outbreak of violence with sovereign Native nations. Colonization received a new federal imperative as a nation building tool that could end wars in the South and West and prevent future hostilities.516

In his first annual message to Congress in December 1861, Lincoln attested that to carry out a plan of black colonization it would be necessary for the nation to acquire new territories, beyond western territories already in U.S. possession. In detailing the connection between expansion, empire, and race, Lincoln aligned his plan of colonization with the established principle “that the only legitimate object of acquiring territory is to furnish homes for white men,” since as he reasoned “the emigration of colored men leaves additional room for white men remaining or coming here.”517 In reference to the first Confiscation Act, recently passed by

Congress in August 1861, Lincoln suggested that enslaved persons falling under the statute be legally declared free and then colonized to “some place or places in a climate congenial to them.”518

Supporting African colonization was not a stretch for Lincoln as he was a product of colonizationist intellectualism fostered in the Northwest. In particular, its harmony with political antislavery that espoused free black removal as a progressive policy.519 Lincoln personally

515 Heather Cox Richardson, “Abraham Lincoln and the politics of principle” Marquette Law Review (v. 93 no. 4, 2010), 1390-1391. Heather Cox Richardson, To make men free a history of the Republican Party (New York : Basic Books, 2014). 516 The works of Magness and Page, alongside Nichols, collectively articulate Lincoln’s projection of an antislavery vision across the nation. Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page, Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the movement for black resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). David A. Nichols, Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War policy and politics (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978). 517 Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln : his speeches and writings 2nd ed. (Da Capo Press, 2001), 616-634. 518 Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln : his speeches and writings 2nd ed. (Da Capo Press, 2001), 616-634. 519 While Lincoln is lauded by some as an emancipationist and political visionary that fought for political and racial liberalism his Presidential actions are somewhat contradictory. Historian George Fredrickson, parroted DuBois, and labeled him “big enough to be inconsistent.” George M. Fredrickson, Big enough to be inconsistent : Abraham Lincoln confronts slavery and race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), xi.

228 modeled himself as a politician after Henry Clay, former president of the ACS. As such, he had been a supporter of colonization since the 1840s and first publicly spoke in favor of colonization in 1852 in his eulogy of Henry Clay.520

In May 1862, colonizationist James Mitchell repurposed his Letter on the Relation of the

White and African Races and wrote a new version that he addressed solely to President Lincoln.

In this new edition, Mitchell opened by submitting that “the peace and prosperity of the country and the permanency of our republican civilization, require a separation of the colored or negro race from us,” for which Lincoln had the supreme authority as President to pursue and execute such a plan.521 Mitchell requested that Lincoln use all necessary powers available to him, as well as to lobby the states, to pursue colonization and “produce the separation of those races, the removal of the colored race to a proper locality, and establishment in independence there.”522

Mitchell viewed the Civil War as a battle between the anti-republican despotic nature of the Slave Power and the republican principles of men with social and political equality in the

North. In agitating for the necessity of colonization Mitchell warned that “Our danger in the future arises from the fact that we have 4,500,000 persons, who, whilst amongst us, cannot be of

Donald and Foner traced Lincoln’s evolution along a path of increasing moral and political progressivism that ends with his acceptance of black equality and abandonment of colonization. Oakes showed the influence Lincoln’s relationship with Douglass had on his progressive Reconstruction politics. President Lincoln exhibited the same free soil antislavery colonizationist politics accustomed to the Old Northwest. Much like colonization in the Old Northwest, his abandonment of colonization as President was influenced most by the sheer unwillingness and activism of African Americans. Eric Foner, The fiery trial: Abraham Lincoln and American slavery (New York : W.W. Norton, 2010). David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Eric Foner, Our Lincoln : new perspectives on Lincoln and his world (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). James Oakes, The radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the triumph of antislavery politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 520 Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American slavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010), 127. 521 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 3. 522 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 3.

229 us—persons of a different race, forming necessarily a distinct interest.”523 Mitchell attested that the “social and civil evils resulting from the presence of the negro race are numerous,” which included slavery’s damage to Christianity, slavery’s exacerbation of political disputes which led to the Civil War, and most importantly the traditional family.”524 Mitchell argued that the nation was encumbered by “trying to decide the first great military struggle—but we fear not the last, arising from the presence of the negro race—demonstrating that this population is in the way of the peace of the country, the cause of immorality and misrule.”525

Mitchell believed that the millions of enslaved persons in bondage in the South were a hindrance to both the social and civil structure of the nation. The only remedy he could envision was “the gradual removal of such anti-republican elements and peoples as cannot be engrafted on the national stock,” specifically enslaved and free blacks alike.526 This was the only solution because the alternative, “to open every social and civil avenue to this African mass: the office; the legislative hall, the family ; to pour the blood of near five million Africans into the veins of the Republic,” was an option that neither the citizens of the South, West, or North would actually support.527 As Mitchell argued in a revealing, and unbeknownst to him prophetic statement,

“We must regard the extension of equal social and civil rights to this class of persons as distateful [sic] to the mass of the nation ; the majority will never submit to it : any attempt to enforce it will lead to restlessness and trouble in the West ; nor will citizens made in the East for western or southern use, answer a wise and peaceful purpose. Thus ends the

523 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 4. 524 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 5. 525 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 6. 526 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 7. 527 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 8.

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remedy of the first class of statesmen ; it falls short of the evil it proposes to remove—it does not bring national quiet.”528 In Mitchell’s estimation, no region of the nation would be willing to accept black equality and therefore attempting to incorporate formerly enslaved persons into the nation would disrupt any objective of peace and reconciliation.

In plainly articulating the continued appeal and coherence of colonizationist ideology,

Mitchell argued that in mobilizing the federal government to colonize the black population “that our legislation should cover the wants and well-being of both races, and that statesmen should consider, first, the good of the white race, then the good and well-being of the black.”529 Mitchell even declared that funds for black colonization should replicate funds appropriated “for the colonization of the Indian, upon whom millions on millions have been expended with but imperfect success in the cause of civilization.”530

In June 1862, Lincoln appointed James Mitchell as the official commissioner of emigration for his administration. Lincoln had first met James Mitchell in the 1850s as the two became linked in the Northwest in support of colonization. Mitchell would be responsible for overseeing the execution of black colonization schemes. Lincoln was not alone in his pursuit of colonization in the midst of the Civil War. He received support from longtime colonization proponent and Missouri Republican congressman Francis Blair, Jr.531 Wisconsin Senator James

Rood Doolittle was also a fervent colonization supporter.

528 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 10. 529 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 25. 530 Letters on the relation of the White and African Races in the United States, showing the necessity of the Colonization of the latter (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 25. 531 Michael Vorenberg, "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 29.

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In August 1862, Lincoln welcomed a small group of prominent free black men to the

White House. During this meeting, he put forth his plan for colonization, which the black delegation soundly rejected. Lincoln had proposed emigration to Panama instead of Liberia because of the expensive nature of transporting free blacks to Liberia, much to the dismay of the

ACS.532 The black men who met with Lincoln at the White House in 1862 were prominent men from the free black community in Washington, D.C., with three being members of the Social

Civil and Statistical Association.533 Lincoln’s appeal to the black delegation at the White House for colonization declared, “The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free ; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best.”534

Lincoln also solicited the support of his cabinet to “make treaties with foreign governments in order to establish colonies.”535 His cabinet initially rejected the idea but changed to support it by the fall of 1862 within discussions of Lincoln’s threat of emancipation to the

Confederacy and Congress’s approval of $600,000 in funds to pursue colonization.536

In December 1862, President Lincoln signed a contract with Bernard Kock for a colonization scheme to transport free blacks from the United States to Haiti.537 Lincoln pursued

532 Michael Vorenberg, "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 14, no. 2 (1993), 35. 533 Kate Masur, “The African American Delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A Reappraisal” Civil War History (v. 56 no. 2, 2010), 119. 534 Report on Colonization and Emigration made to the Secretary of Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1862), 6. 535 Michael Vorenberg, "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 37. 536 Vorenberg, Michael. "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 37. 537 Vorenberg, Michael. "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 23.

232 colonization as a compromise measure to entice border slave states to support emancipation.538

The previous year in 1861, Lincoln had pursued a colonization scheme to transport free blacks to

Panama.539 By 1863, 450 free and freed people had been deported to Ile a Vache, Haiti.

However, by 1864 with the failure of several colonization schemes, and the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union military, Congress shifted its support and withdrew funds available to

Lincoln for colonization. Lincoln’s administration had spent less than $40,000 of the $600,000 that had been initially made available for black colonization.540

The outbreak of the Civil War almost entirely halted the sale of public lands in the North and West, as many white male citizens who would most likely had become western settlers instead became Union soldiers.541 This was a substantial loss of revenue for the federal government at a most inopportune time. However, the federal government had also recently organized territorial governments in Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada and officially opened those spaces for settlement.542 Lincoln’s wartime administration and the Republican Party directed “an activist federal government to promote widespread economic equality” and “the advancement of a new free-labor society of individual, well-educated workers.”543

War with the Confederacy also provoked the defection of Native nations in Indian

Territory. As Secretary of Interior Caleb B. Smith submitted, “it is not surprising that” Native

538 Vorenberg, Michael. "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 24. 539 Vorenberg, Michael. "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 28. 540 Vorenberg, Michael. "Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization." Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association vol. 14, no. 2 (1993), 41. 541 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1861), 443. 542 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1861), 445. 543Heather Cox Richardson, “Abraham Lincoln and the politics of principle” Marquette Law Review (v. 93 no. 4, 2010), 1392.

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“loyalty was unable to resist such influences,” given that the war had caused a redirection of the

U.S. military away from Indian territory and a suspension of annuity payments that provided an opening for Confederate influence.544 Meanwhile, Smith lauded Native people in Nebraska and

Kansas as “gradually progressing in the arts of civilization” due to the “plan of allotting portions of their reservations to the individual members of the tribes.”545

President Lincoln expressed his personal belief that “upon the repossession of the country by the Federal forces the Indians will readily cease all hostile demonstrations and resume their former relations to the Government.”546 He also thought that the western territories’ natural resources would soon “invite to them a large immigration when peace shall restore the business of the country to its accustomed channels.”547 By 1863 public land sales had picked up its pace that exhibited the success of Republican land policies, in particular the recent Homestead Act.

In accordance with colonizationist ideology, Indian and free black removal and confinement was pursued because of its primary benefit to the nation to end the Civil War and western Indian wars to preserve peace and ensure the nation’s economic development. The secondary benefit would be to deliver free blacks and Native Americans to spaces free from white encroachment or prejudice to realize their full potential.

Newly appointed Secretary of Interior John P. Usher reported that “While the regions of country occupied by the Indians remained uninhabited by the whites, the plan of setting apart separate reservations for different bands of the same tribe,” like Native reserves in the upper Old

Northwest and Nebraska, “seemed wise and to promise success; but as the country becomes

544 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1861), 447. 545 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1861), 448. 546 Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln : his speeches and writings 2nd ed. (Da Capo Press, 2001), 616-634. 547 Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln : his speeches and writings 2nd ed. (Da Capo Press, 2001), 616-634.

234 settled, their dependence upon game and the spontaneous productions of the earth become more and more precarious, awhile the necessity for their keeping within the limits of their reservations increases.”548 The re-imposition of reservations in federal Indian policies expressed an older colonizationist principle that privileged white settlers spread onto Indian lands.

In 1867, in the midst of Reconstruction in the South and Indian wars in the West, the

Republican led Congress authorized the organization of the Indian Peace Commission to end white-Native hostilities in the western Plains in the interests of American expansion. Members of the Peace Commission included Missouri Senator John Henderson, Indian Affairs Commissioner

Nathaniel Taylor, abolitionist Samuel Tappan, and veteran army general William T. Sherman.

The Peace Commission negotiated the October 1867 Medicine Lodge treaty in Kansas with representatives of the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Apache nations. Negotiated treaties with western Native nations endeavored to end fighting and confine Native Americans onto reservations. The Peace Commission employed the use of Native reserves that was a prominent aspect of treaty negotiations earlier in the nineteenth century. However, Congress did not immediately ratify treaties negotiated by the Peace Commissioners in 1867 and 1868.549

In the Peace Commissioners first official report submitted to President Johnson in

January 1868, they outlined that their three primary objectives, in order, had been to stem

Native-white hostilities, secure “our frontier settlements and the safe building of our railroads looking to the Pacific,” and develop a “plan for the civilization of the Indians.”550 In a familiar, even if unacknowledged, colonizationist framework, the Peace Commissioners set the priority to

548 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1863), v. 549 David Sim, “The Peace Policy of Ulysses S. Grant” American Nineteenth Century History v. 9 no. 3, (2008), 252. 550 U.S. Congress, House, Report of Indian Peace Commissioners 40th Cong., 2d sess., 1868, 1.

235 their negotiations in terms of benefits for the nation, western expansion, and development of infrastructure, specifically railroads. American western expansion and the quest to extend railroads to the Pacific necessitated the policy of reservations and strict policing of boundaries in the West.551

In seeking to use reservations as a method to assimilate Native Americans into American cultural and economic life, Secretary of Interior Orville Browning noted that the process would take time and that the first step would be to collect Native people in a confined territory.

Browning warned that the “same district should not be appropriated to the savage and the civilized, nor should tribes between whom hereditary feuds exist be brought together, as it would be followed by disastrous results.”552

In trying to achieve these expressed goals, Peace Commissioners proposed a second large

Indian district, which mirrored Indian Territory north of Texas, in the west to forcibly push and then contain all Native people on reservations, in order to quell Indian Wars. In order to secure the frontier they suggested, “if settlers and railroad men will treat Indians as they would treat whites under similar circumstances, we apprehend but little trouble will exist.”553 In terms of “a plan for civilizing those east of the [Rocky] mountains” the commissioners expressed uncertainty about the reservation plan and subsequently suggested a series changes to federal Indian policy to try to better achieve that goal. They determined that new decisions should be made on whether

Indian affairs would fall under civilian or military control. They also proposed a clean sweep of current Indian agents and new appointments, Indian Affairs being designated its own independent Department, preventing Territorial Governors from using the militia to provoke

551 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1867), 7. 552 Annual reports Secretary of the Interior (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Interior, 1867), 8. 553 U.S. Congress, House, Report of Indian Peace Commissioners 40th Cong., 2d sess., 1868, 20.

236 violence with Native nations, removal of illegal squatters from Indian lands, and new approval criteria for Indian traders, among a few other policy suggestions as well.

Ely Parker, the Peace Commission, and the newly formed Board of Indian

Commissioners laid the foundation for the Peace Policy of President Grant’s administration.

Grant’s Peace Policy, which was at times fluid and disjointed, but driven by a moral imperative to do justice to Native Americans, and a larger more organized framework to end Indian-white hostilities executed through a “paternal benevolence” that “was contingent on deference to the ends of white westward expansion.”554 This was an expression of colonizationist ideology. The ability of colonization to unite so many disparate Americans over federal policy governing the future of black and Native lives within the nation was part of the enduring legacy of colonization and its purported benevolence. Citizens, settlers, proponents of free labor, squatters, railroad entrepreneurs, and antislavery non-interventionists, could usually find common ground in agreement that the nation would be best served by deporting Native Americans and free blacks.

Political antislavery espoused by the Free Soil movement resembled colonizationism in that both mobilized disparate coalitions of Americans. African Colonization mobilized antislavery, proslavery, and some abolitionists in the interests of deporting free blacks, whom all agreed represented specific dangers in the South and the Northwest, as well as to deliver free blacks from white prejudice. Native removal united squatters, settlers, clergy, and politicians in finding a purported benevolent method to further dispossession in a manner beneficial to Native people and Americans alike. Free Soilism coalesced as a coalition of Whigs, Democrats, and

Liberty men all united to combat the Slave Power and ensure that freedom would remain

554 David Sim, “The Peace Policy of Ulysses S. Grant” American Nineteenth Century History v. 9 no. 3, (2008), 244.

237 national and slavery sectional. Within that coalition, members compromised on the place, vision, and inclusion of both Native people and free blacks. By seeking to preserve the territories as a space specifically for white settlers, free from slavery and people of African descent, Free Soil and Republican policies reconstructed colonizationist ideology that sought a white republic and projected it as the new vison for the nation’s future. That imagined future required the remaking of the west to turn diverse Indian spaces into racially homogenous territories to execute that vision.

Colonizationists believed their own pronouncements of removal schemes as benevolent and in the best interests of both the nation and removed persons. This fabricated benevolence, which masked a self interest in forging a white republic, held renewed authority as the nation was in the midst of wars in the South, East, and West in the 1860s. The opportunity presented by colonization to end wars in a manner that preserved American expansion and the racial homogeneity of its citizenry was a desired outcome that many Americans, regardless of region, could support.

238

Conclusion

In 1874, a black Indiana citizen, who was the father of Edward and Mary Carter and the grandfather of John and Lucy Carter, petitioned his local Indiana school district to admit his children and grandchildren as students. In a lawsuit, Carter cited an 1869 state law that authorized the taxation of African Americans that provided monetary funds for separate common schools. Since Carter’s district did not have enough African American children to warrant a separate black school, Carter wanted his family’s school aged children admitted to white schools.

A lower court ruled in favor of Carter’s petition, but on appeal, the Indiana Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision and effectively denied Carter’s children a common school education. In the opinion rendered by Justice Samuel Buskirk the court ruminated on whether the

1869 law of racially separated schools violated either the U. S. Constitution or the Indiana

Constitution.555

In support of the court’s ruling Buskirk cited the Slaughterhouse case of 1873 as well as previous school segregation cases such as Garnes v. McCann 1871 in Ohio.556 Most tellingly,

Buskirk’s opinion cited Indiana’s history of exclusionary Black laws as legal precedents and justifications for the continued legal and political discrimination against the state’s black residents in 1874. Buskirk argued that, “There is but one construction which will preserve the unity, harmony, and consistency of our state constitution and that is, to hold that it was made and

555 Cory et al. v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327; (1874) 556 In Garnes v. McCann the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that separate but equal education in public schools was consistent with Fourteenth Amendment. In the Slaughterhouse case the U.S. Supreme court infamously rendered a judgment that limited the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment that empowered state sovereignty in the purview of rights and citizenship. Both cases signified the limits to the Fourteenth Amendment, specifically the privileges and immunities clause, in state and federal courts in the midst of Reconstruction. The State, ex rel. Garnes, v. McCann, 21 Ohio 198; (1871); Slaughterhouse Cases 83 U.S. 36 (1873).

239 adopted by and for the exclusive use and enjoyment of the white race.”557 He then submitted that the Indiana constitutional architects never intended common schools for the usage of African

Americans “when, by the same instrument, that portion of such race as then resided in the State were denied all political rights, privileges, and immunities, and the further immigration of that race into the State was prohibited by the thirteenth article of the constitution.”558 As Buskirk reiterated throughout his opinion, the court had no authority to interpret the law that would reverse its original intent. Only the legislature had the authority to change law. Buskirk also stated “that there is no limitation upon the power of the State, within the limits of her own constitution, to fix, secure, and protect the rights, privileges, and immunities of her citizens, as such, of whatever race or color they may be, so as to secure her own internal peace, prosperity, and happiness.”559 For Buskirk and the court, the promotion of the general peace and prosperity of the state justified the continued race based segregation of common schools.

The Indiana Supreme Court’s ruling in Cory v. Carter not only upheld state law that authorized separate schools based on race, but it also ruled black children had no right to enrollment in a white school. It greatly diminished the obligations of local school districts to provide equal education to black children.560 By citing exclusionary Black laws of the

557 Cory et al. v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327; (1874). 558 Cory et al. v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327; (1874). 559 Cory et al. v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327; (1874). 560 Cory v. Carter became a case cited as legal precedent, amongst many other northern public school access cases, in the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Separate but equal, as authored by the infamous Plessy decision, was based on “determining the question of reasonableness it is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order.” Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537; (1896). In other words, ‘separate but equal’ aligned with a traditions of white prejudice that maintained peace and public order because it forwarded racialized exclusion as a preventive measure against the prospects of racial equality. Colonization shared this basic principle in how it served the ‘the people’ and their public interests that promoted peace and safety for society that made it benevolent, reasonable, and good.

240 antebellum years, the court presented its interpretation of the changes instigated by the Civil

War. The legal and political exclusion of racialized minorities in the interests of civic peace and prosperity that Buskirk espoused in the Indiana Supreme Court’s opinion had an extensive history for African Americans and Indians alike in the nineteenth century’s Old Northwest. Cory v. Carter demonstrated the legacy of that history. The Indiana Supreme Court’s ruling extended a practice that demarcated boundaries for non-white residents that limited their claims to equality and citizenship. Racial discrimination in law had buttressed territorial separation in the ideology of colonization and now it was amended to support continued domestic separation despite the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Colonization, and now explicitly segregation, functioned as state building projects predicated on white prejudice and benevolence, exercised through racial separation, which circumscribed the place of people of color.

Colonizationists promoted the removal of free blacks and Indians as a measure designed to bring peace and order to American frontiers, as it sought to transform Indian territories into American spaces, and developing states that banned slavery and free blacks alike. Racialized legal disability intended to provoke volitional emigration on the part of Native people and free blacks in its support of colonizationist principles. In the 1870s, legal disability sought to preserve localized racially homogenous spaces now that western expansion and black citizenship made colonization all but impossible. Now distance could no longer solve the problems multiracial democracy, so the benevolence of segregation, “conducive to the well-being of the races, and calculated to secure the peace, harmony, and welfare of the public,” would now preserve some measure of colonizationists’ ideals of a white republic.561

561 Cory et al. v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327; (1874).

241

This project recovered the ways in which state making and nation building in the nineteenth century championed and defended the benefits of a racially homogenous citizenry for which Native removal and African colonization were the most transparent, but neither the only, nor the most effective modes of accomplishing that goal. Colonizationist thought that emerged out of these two parallel deportation projects, which centralized the danger that nonwhites posed to the nation, traversed through law and politics and then was repackaged in the Civil War Era as novel nationalist foundations in remaking the United States.

Citizens in Old Northwest promoted and facilitated Indian removal and African colonization in their efforts to make safe, secure, and prosperous states. Colonization sought the emigration, sometimes forcefully, of Indians and free blacks to places outside of the Old

Northwest that would forge these states as racially homogenous. Ideologically colonization foregrounded the expulsion of non-white peoples as a benevolent enterprise that benefitted

Indians, free blacks, and white citizens. Colonizationists explicitly acknowledged the advantages of emigration rested on the belief that Indians and free blacks would be removed from the deterrent of white prejudice that contributed profoundly to their inabilities to become virtuous republican citizens. Colonization failed to make the Old Northwest racially homogenous, but they succeeded in creating an atmosphere of unbelonging for Native Americans and free blacks.

African colonization and Native removal were not simply misguided benevolent movements that espoused redemptive racial theories. Tracing the history and legacy of colonization in the Old Northwest complicates and elucidates the problems of multiracial democracy that facilitated the onset of Jim Crow-ism nationwide. In the context of racialized

242 removal projects, the collapse of Reconstruction instead becomes a form of national self correction for the missteps of multi-racial inclusion.

Colonizationists capitulated to white prejudice espoused by antislavery supporters, squatters, settlers, citizens, missionaries, and politicians who rejected the possibility for Native people and free blacks to become social or political equals within the nation. Colonizationists accommodated by forwarding space and distance as a solution that absolved white prejudice and preserved the republican capabilities of free blacks and Natives to raise themselves to an equal level with white Americans. However, the purported benevolence was actually a mask for colonizationists’ compromise with white racism and self interest in a white republic. In constructing the purported benevolence of the colonization scheme, its supporters fortified a comprehensive white nationalism unobstructed by the presence of slavery, free blacks, or Native people, who would be expunged from the nation.

Colonization was not elite Americans having a difficulty in being outwardly racist as some historians have contended, in reality colonization was an expression of their racism through apprehension or plain denial for multiracial inclusion.562 Racial separation that would establish a white republic was a prejudicial idea and that was central to its allure. Its wide ranging appeal was its melioration of white prejudice that absolved the violence of dispossession and slavery, along with legal disability that promoted white nationalism. As free blacks argued colonization’s only benevolence was for white citizens that wanted to expunge the nation of people of African

562 Historians have become seduced by the self-proclaimed benevolence of colonizationists that obscures the racism of colonizationists, no matter how well intentioned or enlightened. Reassessing colonization, particularly through the discourse advanced by Native, black, and white anticolonizationists, reveals its inegalitarian nature. Nicholas Guyatt, Bind us apart: how enlightened Americans invented racial segregation (New York : Basic Books, 2016), 10.

243 descent. Newly forming separate but equal ideology sought to maintain public order through consent for traditions of white prejudice that sanctioned racialized exclusion and inequality.

Colonizationism was the American moral reconciliation of Native dispossession, slavery, expansion, and racism with republicanism. In the case of both Native removal and African colonization the potential expungement of racialized others unified white citizens who shared sometimes opposing politics but could agree that relocating nonwhites was good a foundation for the future. That unity was built on sacrificing the lives, rights, safety, and property of Indians, abolitionists, and free blacks.

While historians usually discuss colonization in terms of slavery, free blacks discussed colonization specifically in terms of its threat to black freedom and inevitable perpetuation of slavery. Free blacks determined that colonization posed a greater threat to black freedom than it did to the institution of slavery.

244

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